No Time for Pity and other Tales

About the Book

From more than 150 short stories produced during four decades of professional writing, Barbara has picked twenty that show a variety of themes, from humour to tragedy, love to hate, revealing a wide range of human emotions and yearnings, and the highs and lows that make humanity such a fascinating study.

The opening story, No Time for Pity, is a new look at an old crime: the murders of two young princes in the Tower of London, 1483. Australians are all too aware of the theme of Beached Spirit - the unwelcome arrival of beached whales. For light relief, The Cornish Pot introduces a real fairy, and in Whatever Happened to Love? the eccentricities of the aristocracy meet head-on with the end result of an ungentlemanly act.

Malcolm, 15, goes to The Island to escape the irritations of family life, but the island's peace is transitory. The Old Bloke introduces us to a tramp, whose unchanging routine is shattered when he finds a dollar coin outside a fairground.

How wrong can you be? The author in Breakfast in Paradise fancies himself as a student of human nature. But his confidence is deflated when breakfast at the Hotel Paradiso turns briefly into chaos. Are people ever what they seem?

The final story, The Wallflower, has been included because of its special status in Barbara's career - it was the first she ever sold, and it was broadcast by the BBC.

About the Author

BARBARA YATES ROTHWELL lived, married and brought up six children in Surrey, England, before emigrating to Western Australia in 1974 with her musician husband and their two youngest daughters. Her other children arrived in Australia in due course.

She was for ten years in the 1980s a music reviewer for The West Australian newspaper. Having successfully written and sold innumerable short stories and articles to major magazines in several countries, Barbara decided to branch out into novel writing. Longman Cheshire published her teenage historical novel, THE BOY FROM THE HULKS, in 1994, and in 1998 her historical novel DUTCH POINT was published privately in England.

In 2004 she joined forces with Trafford Publishing (Canada) to produce COULTER VALLEY, an Australian story tracing the effects on a family of artists of a despotic father; and in 2005 the same cooperation produced KLARA, fiction based on fact, the story of a German Jewess who, forced to leave Nazi Germany, was sponsored by an English family. RIPPLE IN THE REEDS (2006) tells the story of a French girl, who marries against her parents' wishes and finds herself in wartime Germany. A new life awaits her in Australia - until the past catches up.

Barbara was a journalist in the UK for several years, as Women's Page Editor for a large group of weekly papers in the south of England, and as a free-lance. She has written two full-length and several one-act plays, performed in community theatres in Western Australia and New South Wales.