A L Barker's first selection of short stories, Innocents, won the Somerset Maugham award in 1947. Of her short stories, Robert Nye has written, 'stories as carefully composed as poems, quiet and delicate and reserved perhaps, but oddly lingering in the mind.'

The eleven stories in her collection No Word of Love - one of her six volumes of short stories being reissued by Faber Finds - are imaginative, concise and intensely evocative.

Here she writes about people who, for good or bad, need each other; people in love or in need of love; people growing up and growing old. A L Barker effortlessly draws us into her stories, and those moments when the quirks of the human heart reshape the lives of her characters are engraved on our memory.

Praise for A L Barker:

'The freshness of vision that she brings to the often humiliating circumstances in which her characters entrap themselves is matched by the freshness of her style. She is a writer to treasure.' Spectator

'Humane, funny, and written so precisely that the skin tingles.' Cosmopolitan