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LITTLE MARVEL AND OTHER STORIES by Wendy Perriam Hale, £18.99, pp.223, ISBN 9780709085973 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
Wendy Perriam's latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in 'Birth Rage', where a woman loses her temper with a selfobsessed harridan in an anger management class and suddenly finds her lifelong rage melting in the same woman's arms. In 'Germans', there is sustained psychological accuracy; Alice has come to heal a 40-year rift with her aunt Patricia which developed when Alice married a...