[The stories in From the Fifteenth District] show a novelist's imagination at work, spanning a large public world and penetrating many private ones. Gallant ranges over the European scene since the mid-1930s, but never strays far from World War II. That war haunts almost every story; it is an approaching conflict, an upheaval which has just ended, leaving the world in disarray; or a distant but persistent memory which still undermines the postwar era of peace.

Most of the characters who inhabit this unsettled international world are exiles from their homelands, not by force or by design, but by virtue merely of circumstances, dire and not so dire. Gallant traces their personal histories in stories that proceed at an unhurried pace, accruing details and nuances about pasts, places, relationships, and inner lives. The most telling details are those that reveal what her characters selectively remember or forget...