‘Sylvia would have liked him vastly better without his gun; she could not understand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much.’

A tale for our times, ‘A White Heron’ follows Sylvia, a young woman who moves from the city to live with her grandmother in the Maine countryside. One day she is approached by a trophy hunter, who is keen to track down a rare and elusive bird so that he can shoot it and preserve it – but Sylvia finds herself enabling the bird’s escape.

Painting beautiful portraits of American countryside, and tapping into deep debates around humans and their relationship with nature, this extraordinary short-story collection was years ahead of its time, and is ripe for rediscovery.