The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty was given to me by my friends Ben and Claire for my birthday. I am not normally a fan of a collection of short stories, but these short stories are different – they follow the same characters through time so you are actually viewing snapshots of their interwoven lives as they grow up, age and die.

It was first published in 1949 and is set in a small town in the deep south of America and is about the lives of the (white) families who live there (notably any description of life for the black population of Mississippi is absent).

Through the course of these snapshots lots of things happen to the protagonists, but in a way that if it was a novel you would feel cheated that nothing substantial had happened. But the sum of these short stories creeps up on you – they are actually full of action. Love, loss and loneliness are all in abundance as people’s destinies play out. I particularly liked the forward glimpses during the telling, so that whilst an event was occurring the effects it would be having many years later are touched on in passing.

The way the author uses language forces you to read this book slowly, so that you experience the moment-by-moment pace of life she describes. A phrase that stayed with me for instance was ‘drying every circle of the potato masher with care’. I am naturally a fast reader so this enforced slowness seemed particularly apt given I read it whilst relaxing staying with my 95 year old grandfather for a few days whose life moves very much at the pace of this book.

I can’t say that I found The Golden Apples to be easy reading, but it’s place in Penguin Modern Classics is well deserved.