One day, alone in the church, Alice is surprised by an escaped prisoner in felon's clothing and hood who tells her that he is an educated man, a poisoner by the name of Savage.

Savage tells her that he needs women's clothes to make good his escape on the next ship bound for England, and they arrange for him to come to her house under cover of darkness.

Overhearing Mary in the kitchen singing German lieder quietly to herself while making the tea, Beehernz insists that she be taken straight back to Iona.

Dr Mehmet Bey, a prosperous Turkish doctor in the Beyazit area of Istanbul, takes on 14-year-old Alecco as an apprentice as an act of compassion.

Many years later, Alecco - now an experienced young doctor who has studied with the greatest specialist in Vienna - is asked to provide a second opinion on one of Mehmet Bey's cases.

Fothergill is employed by Lady P. as a poorly-paid caretaker at Tailfirst farm, an Arts and Crafts building by Philip Webb that is shown to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Hearing that Fothergill has recently appointed a disruptive new steward, Mrs Horrabin, Lady P. calls her employee in and instructs him to dispense with her services.

Fothergill's mind returns to the preceding Tuesday when the aggressive and vulgar Mrs Horrabin had arrived unheralded, baldly announcing that she intended to take over from the existing stewards.

In 1880 at the age of 20 Dimi is sent by his father to paint a portrait of an elderly relative, Aunt Calliope, who lives with her great niece Evgenia in Fener, the Greek district of Stanboul.

San Thomás de las Ollas, an old silver-mining town in Mexico, is dominated by English and American incomers whose culture is markedly different from that of the native residents.

Mrs Sheridan, widow of one of the mine investors, is benevolently concerned for the family of her Mexican chauffeur, Pantaleón, who has been taking advantage of her to support his dependants.

One of his family members is a young mixed-race woman named Esperanta, paternity uncertain, who sells fish in the local market while looking after a new baby.

The Europeans and Americans donate large sums to money to build a new market, while the locals resignedly endure the catastrophe with the nostrum "venimos prestados" – our lives are only lent to us.

He insists that Jack accompanies him upstairs where he finds an apparently lifeless boy lying on a bed with the medal clasped in his outstretched hand.

[5] Welcoming the book's publication in 2000, Ruth Scurr for The Times considered that each of the stories reflected the careful and distinctive hand of a true artist.

Adam Mars-Jones noted that all of Fitzgerald's novels are miniatures, making it the more surprising that yet a further reduction of scale should result in stories that are so readable and so sharply tender.

[6] Frank Kermode for the London Review of Books praised the author's "wonderfully economical habit", and suggested that although not all these stories have the fineness and fullness of the novels, some of them do have a touch of the same quiet power to astonish.

[7] Publishers Weekly called the stories strange, whimsical, gothic and bizarre, demonstrating Fitzgerald's cool and civilized wit and the merciless eye she casts on worldly pretensions.

[8] Kirkus Reviews thought that "everything that Fitzgerald touches here, large or small, turns quietly to gold" and that the collection will disappoint readers "only by the fact of its being so slender".

Although the realities of life include cruelty, indifference, violence, and the exercise of power, the stories are also coloured with Fitzgerald's characteristic tender, funny alertness to human oddity and ordinariness.