A. L. (Audrey Lillian) Barker has been acclaimed for her short stories, although she has written nine novels as well. Critics have noted, however, that her truncated, episodic style fails to lend itself to the longer form. In Life Stories (1981), a collection of autobiographical essays and short fiction, she writes that "in my credo the short story was one of two literary forms in which it was just possible that complete integration could be achieved: the other form, which often blazingly achieved it, being poetry." Whether in novels or short stories, an aspect of that integration is her lifelong concern with the themes of innocence, experience, and the impossibility of understanding another person or communicating, along with the resultant absurdities of such conditions.

Barker began writing when she was nine years old. In Life Stories she recalls a childhood episode in which she saw a red-tiled floor through...