Mending collects stories from four books and includes six new ones, representing the best of Bingham's 50-year career.
"Spanning 50 years, this omnibus of Bingham's tight, sparkling short fiction includes stories from her earliest collection, The Touching Hand (1967), to her latest, Red Car (2008). The title story that opens the collection demonstrates the attention to detail and skillfully rendered emotional tension that characterize Bingham's work. . . . Bingham's work, including favorites such as "The Wedding" and "Sweet Peas," remains sharp and deliciously unsettling, ripe for discovery by a new generation of readers."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This collection of new and selected stories spans work from 1967 to the present by an important writer who is too little known. These stories are remarkable for their economy of language and for the author's ability, within a small frame, to allow the undefined but intense emotion of a central character (male or female, young or old) to sharpen in focus to the point at which both reader and character share the surprise of insight."
-Sue Russell, Library Journal
"The layers of the unspoken in Bingham's stories afford them the repleteness of novellas, belying their accessible surfaces, which are as absorbing as gossip. . . . Selected from five decades' work, these stories distill the mysterious glow that lives emanate as they recede into the past, and confirm Bingham's place in the front rank of practitioners of this elusive genre."
-The New Yorker