Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Truman Capote is what I would call a masterful writer, and one I have never read before. Breakfast at Tiffany's is a short novel and then the book also contains three stories. The best of these is "A Christmas Memory," a sad but beautiful story of an intergenerational friendship. It inspired me to get out my fruitcake recipes:

The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whisky, bask on window sills and shelves.

This is one of the few Christmas stories I would dare to compare with Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.