Although she has received various awards, it was with her 2011 novel The Conductor that her literary career really took off, as it became a bestseller in New Zealand, received several translations and overseas editions and has sold in 10 countries.
The 22 stories in this collection vary in length from the 74 pages of the opening novella, The Marriage Mender, to the two pages of the last story, When Sunday Came.
The collection includes stories written and/or published since 1998, when Quigley's first collection, Having Words With You, appeared.
The stories are set, as the back-cover blurb informs us, in locations that span the globe from Sweden to the Antarctic Ocean, from upper-class London to Santa Monica, from Auckland Airport to Sapporo to the snow-covered Palace Gardens of Leningrad/St Petersburg.
The techniques and structures are as varied as the places, with experiments in point of view such as a first-person narrator speaking to the reader from the story, or in structure with a story limited to one dramatic scene, to a story that summarises the history of a six-month marriage in four pages.
The title indicates the unifying theme, which Quigley said evolved naturally.
Almost all the stories deal with human relationships, most involving two people, many having a sexual element; in all the underlying criterion for genuine relationship is tenderness, implying compassion and the attempt to feel with the other person and treat him or her with understanding and acceptance.
In some stories tenderness prevails, as in The Marriage Mender, in which Sadie, the narrator, attempts as a divorce lawyer to treat her clients with tender understanding, often mending marriages instead of overseeing a break-up, and then returns to her youthful dream and deploys that understanding in becoming a writer.
More frequently, tenderness meets barriers it cannot overcome.
In the Palace Gardens' differences of age and culture keep the two protagonists apart, although both show goodwill.
Those cultural differences (what Henry James called the international theme) are especially strong when New Zealanders encounter narcissistic, self-involved Americans in several stories.
However, Shirker and The Addition (first published in Second Violins in 2008 as a story inspired by the first paragraph of an unfinished Katherine Mansfield story), show self-absorbed narcissism is not limited to American males, while in Breathing Out, The Crane and Waiting for the Wolves it is not human ego but rather sickness and death that defeat tenderness.
• Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
