Thank you to Netgalley, the publishers and of course the author for gifting me this advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.


I am a die hard Daphne Du Maurier fan and she is an author like no other. I was so pleased to receive this copy which was a perfect book to read over the halloween period.

I’m a huge du Maurier fan but have never read any of her short stories, and I’ve never even seen the film version of The Birds.

This book includes 6 short stories, which are all very different but all have a gothic theme. The final story (The Old Man) was my least favourite to begin with because it was quite slow, but then it had an ending that came from absolutely nowhere!

With thanks to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group UK for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this book as I love most of what I've read by Daphne Du Maurier. She had a real gift for writing completely believable characters and putting them in sinister, haunting and genuinely disturbing settings.

In this collection my favourite is The Apple Tree. I could read it over and over again. The premise is that a husband has recently lost his wife, and becomes haunted by an apple tree in his garden that seems to eerily resemble her. I absolutely love the descriptions of Midge, the long-suffering and now dead wife. Her behaviour is so recognisable that I would think every reader must have come across someone like this. On the surface she seems utterly irritating - never satisfied, never happy, constantly nitpicking about things and making clear that she isn't happy while never directly saying what she actually wants.

It's infuriating, and we can see how the husband was driven slightly mad by it. But then, we hear about how she was when they first married. How she seemed to have expectations of how their relationship would be and how very easily he destroyed those expectations and paid no heed to what she actually wanted or needed. Then, I start to sympathise with Midge and understand how she ended up being the bitter and unhappy woman that she was when she died.

The strength of it is that it reads so easily, this description of their relationship while meanwhile the madness with the apple tree is ongoing and it's not clear if he's actually going mad or if Midge somehow IS haunting him via the tree. Absolutely brilliant.

I also really enjoyed The Little Photographer and The Old Man. Both have the same type of descriptions of dysfunctional, frustrating relationships but with a particular unexpected twist in the last one.

This is a great collection for anyone who loves creepy, unsettling, well written tales.

A great book to get a feel for Du Maurier's writing. Beautiful prose with sumptuous detailing, I couldn't get enough. Now I'm going to reread Rebecca.

A collection to unsettle

This re-issue of stories initially published in 1952 under the title of one of the other stories, The Apple-Tree comes with a fine introduction by David Thomson. Unlike many introductions it can be read before the stories themselves, as it mainly recounts the history of du Maurier’s stories and novels which were adapted into films. Hitchcock of course features, and it was his film of the short story which gives the re-issue its present title, which pushed du Maurier’s story into reaching a much wider audience.

Hitchcock of course, changed the story of an isolated Cornish community into a Californian setting. Film and story stand differently, both splendidly formed as themselves

It was a real pleasure to re-read these stories. With The Birds, which inevitably is painted over in my mind by the Hitchcock visuals, I really appreciated, as I often do, the wonderful rhythms of du Maurier’s writing.
She paints such clear visuals, crisply, poetically, menacingly, and with wonderful spareness.

There are 6 stories here, and each, in a quite different way, builds a sense of something brooding, dangerous, not quite right. Sometimes the malevolence is of something supernatural, sometimes something all too human.

Each story, in its own way, is a gem. I did particularly like the present and previous title stories, and the final story, The Old Man, which does not fully reveal itself until the final paragraph.

This is a particularly fine collection to read or re-read as the nights lengthen………………..

It was great to read the classic The Birds and to read more stories by Daphne. Definitely recommend this!

I haven't read this since I was a teenager and like all good writing, it changes as you get older. (Quite a bit older!) This is a classic collection of gothic / weird fiction that plumbs the depths of the human psyche and generally leaves you with a sense of unease, as if you're not seeing what's really there when you look at reality. There's so much more underneath. Knowing more about the author now, and having a lot more life experience, I picked up on themes in these stories that passed me by at 13. In the Birds, for example, there's a definite bisexual feel to the MC which Hitchcock )probably accidentally) included in his film. Overall this was a welcome reread, perfect for the spooky season.