The standout story in this collection is also the longest. “Princess Diana’s Funeral” begins on the streets of Westminster on the eve of the famous ceremony of 6 September 1997.

Xandra Bingley’s first collection of short stories, Ways of Telling, is written in a distinctive style. It presents a series of memorable vignettes that feature workaday concerns, interior monologues and a jubilant disregard for the norms of standard punctuation. In a perceptive introduction to the volume, the novelist Margaret Atwood suggests that Ways of Telling recalls the soliloquising of Joyce’s Molly Bloom, as well as Dickens’ interest in how “ordinary people actually talk”, and those Ivy Compton-Burnett novels that are entirely composed of conversations.

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