Dan Davin was a New Zealand Rhodes scholar who became Academic Publisher at the Clarendon Press in Oxford. Throughout his career, in his spare time, he wrote both fiction and works of memoir, from his war novel For the Rest of Their Lives (1947) and Southland novels Roads from Home (1949) and No Remittance (1959) to his collection of war stories The Salamander and the Fire (1986).

Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK, and formerly taught at the University of Otago. She has published widely on New Zealand postcolonial/diaspora writers such as Dan Davin, Fleur Adcock and Katherine Mansfield, and has an interest in globalisation and the short story and cosmopolitan war fictions. She recently coedited Katherine Mansfield: New directions (2019). She edits the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and convenes the AHRC-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network.

"This fine edition of the stories that are perhaps Davin's best offers contemporary readers a chance to experience them as a completed set ... The 'attractive illustrated hardback format ... is appropriate for a definitive edition.' Otago Daily Times, Feb 2008

'The book includes 12 stories from that volume, eight from Breathing Spaces (1975) and six previously uncollected stories ... I hadn’t read them before, and I’m grateful to Wilson for re-presenting Davin’s yarns about a culture that seeded people like me."" – NZ Listener, January 12–18 2008, Vol 212, No 3531

'These 26 stories are so brilliantly crafted that those to whom his wiriting is new are in for a rare treat, while those familiar with his work can look forward to a renewal of initial pleasure.' – Wairarapa Times-Age, Dec 2007"