Jane Gardam's earliest stories are children's stories, but only in the way that some of Katherine Mansfield's are: they recreate directly the sensations and impressions of childhood. Her first three books appeared on Hamish Hamilton's children's list; then came a collection of related short stories for adults, Black Faces, White Faces (1975), which was exceptionally well received: "Jane Gardam has taken the form of the short story as close to art as it is ever likely to reach," Peter Ackroyd wrote in the Spectator. There was praise, too, from Auberon Waugh who hailed Gardam as a "writer of talent and originality," but who treated the collection as a first work, as other critics did; in fact it won the David Higham Prize for Fiction, which is awarded for a first novel. (A later collection, The Sidmouth Letters , published in 1980, has also been described as a novel.) What is important...