The American Jewish immigrants of Bernard Malamud's stories inhabit a world of their own spiritual past and an unanchored present. Anxious, needy, pathetic, blinkered, faltering, kindly, they stumble through life with only the most tenuous links with the places they live in. Penelope Lively's characters are set solidly in and against market towns, Saxon churches, Aldeburgh beaches, High Streets with Smiths, Boots and Sainsburys in them. Yet Malamud's favourite theme—of giving and taking, requesting, withholding, often relenting—also leavens and moulds several stories of Lively's.

In 'The Ghost of a Flea', Angela, doggedly treading the borderline between madness and sanity, reaches out towards Paul and, when he takes hold, hangs on like a leech. He retains enough freedom to fall in love with another girl but does not shake off his burden. Angela after a while attempts and fails at suicide. Paul and his wife-to-be, 'separated and...