Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction

A highly-charged collection of short stories fizzing with sex and desire, tragic loss and unexpected renewal, with settings that range from a Paris café to London's Hayward Gallery, and from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast

Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction is Alison MacLeod's collection of highly charged short stories. 
 
Sexy, tender, funny and haunting by turns, the stories in Alison MacLeod's daring collection are tales of lovers, would-be lovers and lovers gone wrong. Here we discover ECT patient Gloria, who falls for her anaesthetist, 'Dr Numb'; the cerebral Nick, who chases after the heavily pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; and the legendary lovers Heloise and Abelard re-imagined for the twenty-first century. With settings that range from a cheap Paris café to London's Hayward Gallery, and from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast, these stories are at times magical, at times grittily real, but always affecting. 
 
'Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling' Helen Dunmore 
 
'Alison MacLeod's collection of stories is a baker's dozen of excellence book-ended by brilliance' Time Out 
 
'Fragmentary evocations of desire and its mysteries, passing glimpses into minds and hearts: tender; pierced; translucent' Guardian 
 
'Beautifully crafted, they range from brilliantly observed humour to the haunting and heart-rending. Immensely readable' Big Issue 
 
Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. Alison MacLeod is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.

Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling

Alison MacLeod's collection of stories is a baker's dozen of excellence book-ended by brilliance

Fragmentary evocations of desire and its mysteries, passing glimpses into minds and hearts: tender; pierced; translucent

Beautifully crafted, they range from brilliantly observed humour to the haunting and heart-rending.  Immensely readable

Brilliant . . . a jolt of thought electrifying the clogged tissue of the human heart

Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. Alison MacLeod is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.

Sexy, tender, funny and haunting by turns, the stories in Alison MacLeod's daring new collection are tales of lovers, would-be lovers and lovers gone wrong.  Here we discover ECT patient Gloria, who falls for her anaesthetist, 'Dr Numb'; the cerebral Nick, who chases after the heavily pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; and the legendary lovers Heloise and Abelard re-imagined for the twenty-first century.  With settings that range from a cheap Paris café to London's Hayward Gallery, and from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast, these stories are at times magical, at times grittily real, but always affecting.

The Wave Theory of Angels

A stunning metaphysical mystery and a story of attractions, both cosmic and earthly, for fans of A.S. Byatt and Ali Smith.

The Wave Theory of Angels is Alison MacLeod's compelling mixture of thriller and philosophical exploration. 
 
Two widowed fathers named Giles. The first, woodcarver Giles of Beauvais in thirteenth-century France, whose unearthly skill leads the medieval Church to suspect him of heresy. The second, maverick twenty-first-century physicist Giles Carver, who risks his reputation and livelihood for a heretical theory. 
 
Both Gileses have daughters named Christina who each fall into a strange coma from which they will not wake. And in their dreams both girls struggle to return to the world that they left behind - a reality which seems to be turning away from them. Are the memories they cling to real? Is the lover they both dream of a protector - or a more sinister presence? And are the men who claim to be their fathers actually someone else entirely 
 
'Part thriller, part philosophical treatise. Quite wonderful' Time Out 
 
'Weaves science with mystery, justified faith with prejudice . . . an unfolding thriller in which the big question is whether one can die of an excess of emotion' Independent on Sunday 
 
'A daring investigation of medieval philosophy, modern-day physics, and the relation of both to faith and desire . . . a novel with a passion for ideas. MacLeod has an engaged delight in the stuff of life' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Utterly delightful, beautifully written' Alberto Manguel 
 
Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. Alison MacLeod is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.

In thirteenth-century France, Christina, daughter of heretic and sculptor Giles of Beauvais, struggles to keep a secret. In twenty-first-century Chicago, Christina Carver, daughter of rebel physicist Dr Giles Carver, also keeps a secret.  In each time frame, Christina will fall into a coma and wake to a changed world. It will take all of her father's power to reach his daughter, and all of her love to be brave enough to follow a reality which seems to be changing all around her. Are Christina's memories real, and is the man who claims to be her father really who he says he is?This gripping story unfolds across two worlds, drawing together the contrasting forces of magic and metaphysics to present a place where centuries collide, identities are entangled and communication knows no earthly boundary. In this world anything seems possible, and it's only the strange powers unleashed by human will and imagination that can make a life-or-death difference.

Alison MacLeod

Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile . . . a novel of staggering elegance and beauty

MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty

An exploration of the xenophobia and neurosis unleashed in times of national crisis . . . MacLeod remains one of the most astute chaoticians writing today

Compelling, fast-paced, powerful. The descriptions of wartime Brighton are pin-sharp . . . the denouement is as heartrending as it is unexpected

Unexploded is an unforgettable book. With exquisitely researched and rendered detail, the author plunges us into the panic and paranoia of war, fusing international politics, national politics and family politics in her powerful study of hypocrisy, oppression, cultural misunderstanding and desire

Love, fear and prejudice are all skilfully anatomised in this compellingly intimate exploration of life in war time Brighton

MacLeod has an engaged delight in the stuff of life

'MacLeod's fictions are evocations of desire and its mysteries . . . [Her] characters are strong, and they are worth listening to

Finely wrought, moving and haunting. What a wonderful novel this is. Bravo Alison MacLeod

A persuasive period setting, an intricate plot, sumptuous prose

An intelligent, perceptive novel by a writer of great descriptive power . . . Like her modernist forebears, MacLeod knows that life and death, the terrible and the mundane always co-exist - her genius lies in illustrating these truths while simultaneously spinning a bona fide pageturner

May, 1940. Wartime Brighton. On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches. 
 
It is a year of change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, and Evelyn, desperate to feel useful, begins reading to some of the prisoners. One of them is Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn's and Otto's mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest.

Alison MacLeod

Praise for Unexploded

Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile . . . a novel of staggering elegance and beauty

MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty

An exploration of the xenophobia and neurosis unleashed in times of national crisis . . . MacLeod remains one of the most astute chaoticians writing today

Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile . . . a novel of staggering elegance and beauty

MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty

An exploration of the xenophobia and neurosis unleashed in times of national crisis . . . MacLeod remains one of the most astute chaoticians writing today

Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile . . . a novel of staggering elegance and beauty

MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty

An exploration of the xenophobia and neurosis unleashed in times of national crisis . . . MacLeod remains one of the most astute chaoticians writing today

Books by Alison MacLeod

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