These stories deal with life, love, loneliness, delusion, misunderstanding, death. Their settings range from the colonial outback in the late nineteenth century to contemporary city life. The writing is comic, dry, satirical, vivid, magical, disturbing, poignant, spare. They describe the world as it is, and as it might be.

The Scent of CinnamonThe Number WormMoving the Needle Towards the ThreadGirlieBeaconsAll GoneSoapSomething Rich and StrangeThe Crack NipplesEntertaining FriendsToadAir DamageLittle Potato, Little PeaThe Growing

These are accomplished stories of great subtlety and restraint. I absolutely love ‘The Scent of Cinnamon'. Made all the hairs on my arms stand up. A classic. So confidently and beautifully written ... Charles Lambert is a very interesting writer who could one day attain classic status.

These are accomplished stories of great subtlety and restraint. I absolutely love 'The Scent of Cinnamon'. Made all the hairs on my arms stand up. A classic. So confidently and beautifully written ... Charles Lambert is a very interesting writer who could one day attain classic status. -- Maggie Gee

THE SCENT OF CINNAMONDear Mrs PayneI have been given your name by the Reverend Ware, vicar of the English community here. I am a blunt man, and I shall come straight to the point. Ware tells me that you have recently lost your husband and are without means. He has suggested to me that you may be interested in marriage with a man who can provide you with the security and affection you require. He has indicated to me that I may be such a man. I have every reason to trust Ware's judgement in these matters, above all because he knew you as an unmarried girl and speaks highly of your breeding, modesty and intelligence. For my part, I offer you a man of thirty-seven years, of which nineteen have been passed outside his own country. I have a farm that would comfortably contain an English county. I am fit, healthy and, if Ware is to be trusted also in this matter, of sufficiently pleasing appearance to make my appeal for your hand appropriate and possessing of some possibility of success. I enclose a photograph. The dog's name is Jasper.I look forward to receiving your reply.Yours sincerelyJoseph BroderickIt would do, he thought. He looked at the photograph for a moment and saw a man, a liver-spotted dog, a house, then folded the sheet of paper around it and slid them both into the envelope. Miriam Payne, he murmured, writing these words in his small clear forward-sloping hand, and beneath them an address in Cornwall, a county he had never seen. Miriam Payne he repeated in a stronger voice, then: Miriam Broderick. Yes. It would do.The reply arrived six weeks later and was brief.Dear Mr BroderickThank you for your letter and the photograph enclosed, both of which have given me much food for thought. I shall say at once that I am prepared to consider your offer. However, before doing so, I too shall be frank. I would like you to answer me one question, which may appear impertinent but is, I believe, quite the opposite. Dear Mr Broderick, have you ever been in love? I also enclose a photograph. As you see, I have no dog. I am not sure that I like dogs, nor that dogs like me.Yours sincerelyMiriam PayneThe woman in the photograph was younger than Joseph had expected. Her hair was long, caught up on one side by a clip of some kind and loose at the other to hang across her shoulder. He couldn't tell its colour but imagined it deep and dark and heavy, a lustrous red. Her eyes and eyelashes were also dark. Although she wasn't smiling, the set of her mouth suggested that smiling were its purpose; even solemn, its owner had small dimples in both cheeks. She was dressed in widow's weeds, which made her form hard to decipher, but she appeared to be slender and even elegant. Her hands, crossed on her lap, were small but strong. He closed his eyes and she was still sufficiently there for him to move her and place her beside him, on the other side from Jasper, in front of the house he had built for himself and a wife he had never had. He saw them together and felt his heart beat faster, as though he had chased a runaway sheep across a field. He replied that same day.Dear Mrs PayneThank you for your letter and photograph, both of which considerably eased my mind. The fact that you are prepared to consider my offer fills me with hope and, if I may admit such a feeling, trepidation. As to your question, which is more than pertinent, I can answer without shame that I have never been fortunate enough to have known love, convinced though I am to possess the faculty for it. I look forward with some anxiety to your reply.Yours sincerelyJoseph BroderickAnother six weeks passed. Broderick began to see the house he had built with his own hands through other eyes, through the dark and deep-set eyes of the woman in the photograph. The tamped earth floors, shiny with wear as if waxed, the stone and whitewashed walls, the bareness of the shuttered uncurtained windows, which before he hadn't noticed or had maybe thought appropriate to his single life, as hard and bare as his surroundings, now distressed and embarrassed him. The straight-backed chairs became uncomfortable, unyielding. How could a lady sit on them? How could a lady live in a house so male and austere and unadorned? He would have asked another woman what could be done to make his house acceptable, but there was no married woman in the neighbourhood he could trust to take him seriously. There was no one with the taste required; the women around had neither breeding nor education. Besides, he would look ridiculous if Miriam decided not to marry him, a single middle-aged man, alone in a house full of frills and ribbons. He could have asked Reverend Ware, who had an eye for such things, but didn't.And what would she bring herself, if she did decide to come, he wondered. Paintings, embroidery, cushions perhaps. A musical instrument of some kind. Perhaps the wisest choice would be to wait in the bare house and allow her to mould it into the place she could most comfortably consider her own, her new married home in her new world. And then he imagined her trunks stacked neatly beside her on the quay, a dozen iron-bound trunks, his cart weighed down with them. Sometimes the vision of her was so vivid it seemed that she was already there beside him and he would shake his head until she had gone, and then feel desolate.When her second letter arrived, his hand began to tremble. Jasper barked and clawed at his waist. 'It's all right, lad,' Broderick said. 'It's all right.' And it was.