Carsten the Trustee — Theodor Storm

This is the fourth selection of novellas in the translator's definitive series of translations of a major 19th-century German writer. `The Last Farmstead' and the title-story depict reversals of fortune for farming and burgher families in the economic aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. `The Swallows of St George's' is a poignant love story and a narrative tour de force. In the high-spirited `By the Fireside' a teller of ghost stories finally wins over an initially skeptical audience. The first-and last-mentioned stories appear in English for the first time. Denis Jackson won the 2005 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize for his previous volume of Storm translations, Paul the Puppeteer.