The stories are mainly set in London, where Morand had worked as a diplomat for the Embassy of France.

[2] Ezra Pound had previously made a rejected translation, which was rediscovered in the 1970s and published in 1984 as Fancy Goods.

[4] Ian Thomson of The Guardian wrote in 2012: "Morand's glancing, aphoristic prose – praised by Jean Cocteau and the surrealist André Breton – is often striking.

... For all his flights of purple prose and occasional snobbishness, his London stories are suffused with dark emotions of love, jealousy and regret.

Exquisitely translated by Euan Cameron, Tender Shoots remains a work of haunting, elegiac strangeness.