The Other Garden and Collected Stories by Francis Wyndham

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Francis Wyndham has played midwife to the works of Jean Rhys, Alan Hollinghurst and Edward St Aubyn. Yet, he's been humble about his own fiction until it fell out of print — an injustice remedied by the three books republished here. Wyndham gently evokes lives in limbo, narrators who live vicariously through film and other fantasies, and who pass years in futile but pleasurable longing. Set mostly around the Second World War, these elegiac social comedies describe the perverse satisfactions of unorthodox friendships, sibling love and middle-class Englishness.

Bright Young People — The Rise and Fall of a Generation by DJ Taylor (Vintage, £9.99) He once dismissed 1920s Bright Young People as a bunch of toffs who scarcely merited chronicling, but now DJ Taylor sees the boisterous bunch of hedonists as worthy of book-length study.

Recklessly prankish, their stunts ranged from breaking into stately homes and burning fellow aristocrats' nighties to staging an exhibition of fake modernist paintings, all the while assisting in their own exploitation in the media.

Arguing that this "community of impulse" has "a desperate human interest", and that they were more than a generation of frivolous, blueblooded nonsense-heads, Taylor succeeds in conveying that the movement's real legacy was "an atmosphere ... an outlook, a gesture, an essence".

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

The stories and classic novel collected here are the work of one of the most subtle and observant writers of our time. Drawing on haunting encounters, solitary lives, hours spent in longing, and the blossoming of unlikely friendships, Wyndham's writing is full of gestures that celebrate the day-to-day while at the same time reaching out for a more profound engagement, a larger truth. Just over the horizon is the War, its progression touching the lives of women left behind, of young men awaiting call-up, and of those people who have simply been passed by, left to spend their days in their own familiar worlds; all evoked with grace, wit, and luminous elegy. '"The Other Garden", so swiftly paced, is a gem' - "TLS". 'A singular, particular, gentle, biting, vastly entertaining, original writer' - "Harper's Bazaar".