The stories in Call It Tender are devoted to love, hope, nostalgia; to life in its precariousness, absurdities and joys. Told with the author's characteristic wit and sense of atmosphere - set in Mallorca, Berlin, Wiltshire and Suffolk, Mannheim and New Jersey - they tell of lovers meeting, of how a prisoner struggles, a forester grows curious, a patient survives, a girl falls and falls through space. As a wind blows off the North Sea, a house in London burns, or the Eiffel Tower sparkles in the night, the reader will be able to appreciate why John Saul's fiction has been called funny, beguiling, provocative.His work has further appeared in the prestigious New Writing series and anthologies published by Serpent's Tail.