Long After Midnight

Long After Midnight collects twenty-two stories written across the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period when Bradbury was writing prolifically for magazines and television. The collection shows him in a more domestic, introspective mode than his earlier work: less concerned with Mars and more with marriages, with fathers and sons, with the small acts of cruelty and kindness that make up a life.

The title story is one of his finest: a man who has spent his life being kind to everyone discovers, on the night of his death, that kindness is not enough. It is a story that reads differently at twenty than at fifty. Several stories here return to Green Town and to the Spaulding family, filling in corners of that mythologised world.

The collection also contains The Blue Bottle, perhaps his most beautiful Mars story, in which two men search an abandoned Martian city for a legendary artefact. What they find when they find it is not what either expected. Bradbury understood that the thing you are searching for is never quite the thing you were looking for.