A slight, but enjoyable, collection of short stories, including several modern "ghost" stories, around the theme of love. They do not have the emotional depth, but do touch the emotions. ( )

Excellent collection of short stories, each one to be savoured. ( )

The cover of this collection of Salley Vickers short stories is Cupid Complaining to Venus by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1525). Here a mewling cupid is fighting off a swarm of bees his mother oblivious to his distress. The goddess of love stands almost naked apart from her flamboyant hat – revealing and concealing, an enigmatic smile on her face. She knows much but seems unwilling to tell all. The stories behind the cover she decorates discloses human hopes, frailties, desires and the delights, fears and inexplicable chances given to love and lovers. There’s also the obverse that sometimes desires are obscured and chances missed.

Echoing the troubled relationship on the cover there are wicked and good stepmothers; one greeted with open arms and the other trumped by her disliked stepson. Mrs Radzinsky’s an old crone accused by her Residents’ Association of being an ageing prostitute but who turns into an Aphrodite herself spreading love and blessings. Maternal jealousy creates havoc in a Hansel and Gretel-type story with dangerous implications as a little girl grows up. There’s a delightful unexpected Christmas birth with rather miraculous parentage; myth subsumed into ordinary life. And while one mother finds her true love through Matthew Arnold’s poem The Buried Life, there’s another distressed child in the background.

The joyful sits alongside the tragic and there a slightly creepy festive pantomime, friendships altered irrevocably by love affairs and a flapjack in St Ives leads to an interesting development, a May-December relationship and a happy if snatched ending. The Indian Child is an amusing reimagining of the Theseus Titantia story from the viewpoint of the little boy argued over and the cause of such chaos to Shakespeare’s mortals – Will makes an appearance himself. Oh and I do hope it’s true that anyone can ring the National Gallery and be put ‘through to a young man who was an art historian’ who proceeds to explain the iconography of the Cranach painting.