The cover of this 1976 Penguin paperback looks like the picture here. The cover on the bookshelf is from a more recent edition. This is a collection of six short stories from John Wyndham: Consider Her Ways (which is really a novella as it is almost half the book); Odd; Oh Where Now is Peggy MacRafferty; Stitch in Time; Random Quest; and, A Long Spoon.

The theme to most of the stories is distortions in time, and he has some intriguing and thought-provoking slants on this. The title story "Consider Her Ways", is about a woman who wakes up several years in the future to find herself as an obese brood-mare in a female-only world. This is genuinely disturbing in parts, and some have said that there is an anti-feminist rant in the middle section of the story, but I don't remember it. I also loved the final part of the story, when the central character gets back to her own time, and decides to take it into her hands to stop the onward progression of history, but like many time travel stories there is a sting in the tail. The story does work on the disturbing level of what it would be like to suddenly wake up in a different body and in a different time. I quite felt for "Mother Orchis" being told that from now on she had to spend her life as a blob wrapped in pink satin, unable to think, move freely or read, and there solely to produce litters of daughters.

I'll have to admit that I don't remember the other stories, so I think I'll have to read it again, as it has been almost 30 years since I last did so.