Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfields tragically short life. Many are set in the authors native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the blackly comic "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", and the short, sharp sketch "Miss Brill", in which a lonely womans precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family life in "At the Bay". All that I write, Mansfield said, all that I am - is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.