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If there’s one quality that defines Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses, it’s subtlety. This collection of eight short stories is a masterpiece of observation which clearly demonstrates the author’s perceptive wit.

Set in the 1950s, amidst the corridors and offices of the newly-created monolithic and meandering bureaucracy of “the Organization”– read the United Nations – an American-based concern intent on ‘inflicting improvement’ the world over, readers are introduced to an immalleable world hemmed in by regulations, memoranda and mediocrity. A place where once vibrant personalities are smothered and strangulated by red tape, and the general life-sapping realities of paper-pushing and the exacting demands of pointless tasks reign paramount. read more…