When my parents asked what I wanted for Christmas that year, I told them to get me The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, published in 1996. They honoured my request, and for the remainder of the winter I read little else but that volume, a total of 887 pages. The stories were mostly about North Americans and Europeans, many of them rootless either by circumstance or design. They were about uncovering the truth, about enduring disappointment and loss, about the recurrent shock of being alive. I was thirty years old that winter, a time when I was beginning to take the writing of stories seriously, but still lacked the conviction to regard myself as a writer. Reading those stories put an end to the questions, put the summit before me and put me on my path.

JL: There’s a moment in this story that’s so powerful. The children have come to see their father in the hospital, and he’s about to die. After the visit, there’s a description of them skipping down the stairway now that the obligation is over with, ‘taking the hospital stairs headlong, at a gallop’. To me it’s an example of why I love short stories. You can compress such enormous emotion and human experience into just a handful of words. It happens very seldom in novels. Novels have a more cumulative effect.