The Escape of the Faculty Wife and Other Stories

by Hugh Hawkins

In his childhood memoir Railwayman's Son, Hugh Hawkins found himself resisting a strong temptation to tweak memories for the benefit of narrative form, to make a better story. Now, in The Escape of the Faculty Wife and Other Stories, Hawkins has set remembered incidents and people loose to become the germ of fiction. Spanning the decades from World War II to the Iraq War, the ten stories in this collection are grouped not by chronology, but by locale: campus, hilltown, barracks. One, labeled memoir, relies heavily on detailed recall. In the others, Hawkins has given his imagination free rein. While not, strictly speaking, history, the stories reveal something of the moods and emotions of the recent past, times alternately turbulent and tranquil.

118 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2014

Reviews

[Hans Guttmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hauntingly familiar set of stories, as if the author lived in my town, taught at my father's school, and sailed thru the 40s, 50s and later decades on a journey thru college, the army, Germany, teaching forever before finally retiring, all of which if fact they both did.