This is a selection of short works by the English short-story writer and novelist H. E. Bates, who died in 1974. Chronologically, they range from his first published work, “The Flame,” which appeared in 1926, to the title story of his last collection, ” The Song of the Wren” (1972). Included are two stories by “Flying Officer X,” the pseudonym adopted by Bates while serving in the British Army during World War II.

What an extraordinary writer H. E. Bates could be! One first notes his exuberant power of physicality, of evoking settings with delicate intensity: the look and feel of early fall by an Italian lake in the title story, or the summer fields throughout “The Cowslip Field”; the bleak cold of a military airfield in “It’s Just the Way It Is,” or the hollow bonhomie of an inexpensive London restaurant on a Saturday night (“The Flame”). Then there are the plots. In “A Month By the Lake,” he is able to dangle before us the destinies of two unattached and unspectacular persons until our engrossment takes on the status of a personal investment in a happy ending which, at the same time, we don’t dare anticipate in case we are disappointed. In “Cowslip,” told in the first person by a very young boy who is being taken on an expedition to find “the cowslip field,” the sadnesses of his companion, a plain young rural woman, are gradually disclosed—yet by the child’s affection for her