Liane Smith’s early writing was for children; she published a themed fiction collection and her short stories appeared in several child anthologies, were dramatised on radio by the British Broadcasting Corporation and televised in Ireland. Her professional career inspired a change to non-fiction writing, when she published papers in psychology-of-language journals and a feature article in The Independent. More recently she has been writing poetry and adult short fiction and her recent collection tells the stories of ordinary people in a village community who still struggle to reconcile divisions dating from the Spanish Civil War and the post-war Franco years. Her writing embraces themes of alienation, oppression, survival and love.