SHIRLEY HAZZARD's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satires of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the world of office jobs and dreary marriages. And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy and the splendour of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her characters seek.This marvellous volume includes the stories from Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses. Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard's biographer and editor of this collection has included two previously unpublished stories - `Le Nozze' and `The Sack of Silence' - found among Hazzard's papers. The remaining eight, formerly uncollected, stories were published in magazines, mainly the New Yorker, including her very first published story, 'Woollahra Road'.On winning the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire in 2004 Shirley Hazzard wrote: 'Our world that seems charged with war is also the world in which the frail filament of expression miraculously persists and the phenomenon of the accurate word . . .' Her stories themselves are miraculous expressions: understanding, probing, uncompromising and deeply felt.