Close Company is a gathering of short fiction about one of literature’s most complicated relationships. 

Edited by Christine Park and Caroline Heaton, the anthology moves across generations and cultures, assembling stories in which the maternal bond appears by turns sustaining, coercive, bewildering, comic and impossible to escape.

Colette, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Janet Frame, Alice Munro, Ama Ata Aidoo, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Gardam, Fay Weldon, Fay Zwicky and others. Read together, the stories make the collection of what daughters inherit, what mothers project, and what happens when love is inseparable from expectation. A particularly good Virago anthology from the period, balancing canonical writers with less frequently collected voices.

Virago Press, London, 1987. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf and edge wear to covers, with mild age-toning to pages. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.