Constitutional

Helen Simpson's sixth short-story collection, Cockfosters, follows Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), Constitutional (2005) and In-Flight Entertainment (2010). A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories (2012) includes five stories from each of her first five collections. She has received the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M.Forster Award. She lives in London.

"It's a safe bet that...this slim volume will be hailed as a book of the year. Helen Simpson's short stories are the real thing...one of our most talented writers has produced a collection to savour" Daily Mail "A justly acclaimed expert at the short story form, Simpson deftly weaves in humour with the miserable subjects of spiritual and physical death, to give us a rich tapestry of life's best and worst moments" Sunday Herald "A masterful contemporary exponent of the genre. Simpson now deserves to be compared with Flannery O'Connor and Alice Munro" -- Robert McCrum Observer "[H]er stories come laced with such wit, dark humour and an ear for dialogue that's as sharp as Alan Bennett's" Scotsman "Simpson's use of language is remarkable: she handles prose with the risky precision of a trapeze artist, swooping and tumbling through empty air, seeming certain at moments to succumb to whimsy or sentimentality but at the last moment recovering her grasp on the deftly constructed framework of her narratives. It's a virtuoso performance; its effect on the reader both consoling and exhilarating" -- Jane Shilling Sunday Telegraph