Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Frank Bill

Welcome to Heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling. Frank Bill's Southern Indiana is haunted by a deep, abiding sense of place, and his people are men and women pressed to the brink - and beyond. They are survivors, and in Frank Bill's hands, their stories bristle with noir energy.

Crimes in Southern Indiana

Helen Dunmore

Haunting, uplifting, beautiful: the final work from Helen Dunmore 
 
Helen Dunmore passed away in June 2017, leaving behind this remarkable collection of short stories. With her trademark imagination and gift for making history human, she explores the fragile ties between passion, love, family, friendship and grief, often through people facing turning points in their lives: 
 
A girl alone, stretching her meagre budget to feed herself, becomes aware that the young man who has come to see her may not be as friendly as he seems. 
 
Two women from very different backgrounds enjoy an unusual night out, finding solace in laughter and an unexpected friendship. 
 
A young man picks up his infant son and goes outside into a starlit night as he makes a decision that will inform the rest of his life. 
 
A woman imprisoned for her religion examines her faith in a seemingly literal and quietly original way. 
 
 This brilliant collection of Helen Dunmore’s short fiction, replete with her penetrating insight into the human condition, is certain to delight and move all her readers.

Girl, Balancing

Johanna Skibsrud

These loosely connected hypnotic stories about memory and desire, from Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud, introduces us to an astonishing array of characters who time and again find themselves face to face with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. 
 
A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that he is someone other than who we think he is. A divorced father who fears estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter allows her to take the wheel of his car, realising too late that he’s made a grave mistake. Taking readers from South Dakota to Paris, to Japan, into art galleries, foreign apartments, farms and beach hotels, This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a masterful and perceptive series of tales from one of fiction’s brightest new voices.

This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

Lauren Groff

'Magnificent . . . Lauren Groff is a virtuoso' Emily St John Mandel 
'A blistering collection . . . lyrical and oblique' Guardian 
'Not to be missed . . . deep and dark and resonant' Ann Patchett 
'It's beautiful. It's giving me rich, grand nightmares' Observer 
 
In these vigorous stories, Lauren Groff brings her electric storytelling to a world in which storms, snakes and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats are of a human, emotional and psychological nature. Among those navigating it all are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple; a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable conflicted wife and mother. 
 
Florida is an exploration of the connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury. 
 
'Innovative and terrifyingly relevant. Any one of these stories is a bracing read; together they form a masterpiece' Stylist 
'Lushly evocative . . . mesmerising . . . a writer whose turn of phrase can stop you on your tracks' Financial Times

Florida

Aimee Bender

In Willful Creatures Aimee Bender takes us on a journey to a fantastical world in which authentic love blossoms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a family of pumpkin heads embrace their ironhead son and potato-children dotingly follow their mother around as she completes her daily chores. With the mix of charm and keenly felt emotion that characterised her New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

Willful Creatures

The New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a Richard and Judy bookclub pick, returns with a wonderful collection of enchanting, strange and magical stories. 
 
In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex and family – while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband in ‘The Red Ribbon’ and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre in ‘The Devouring’ and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. ‘Tiger Mending’ follows two sisters who travel deep into Malaysia where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds, and in the title story, 'The Color Master', a company of tailors endeavour to capture the colours of the sun, moon and sky. 
 
Evocative, funny, sad and beautifully written, The Color Master cements Aimee Bender’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and exciting writers of our time.

The Color Master

Tom Hanks

WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR 
 
'Impressive' The Times 
'Funny and pitch perfect' Sunday Express 
'I blink, bubble and boggle in amazed admiration' Stephen Fry 
'These stories are a hit' Financial Times 
 
A small-town newspaper columnist with old-fashioned views of the modern world. A World War II veteran grappling with his emotional and physical scars. A second-rate actor plunged into sudden stardom and a whirlwind press junket. Four friends travelling to the moon in a rocket ship built in the backyard. These are just some of the stories that Tom Hanks captures with great affection, humour and insight - the human condition in all its foibles.

Uncommon Type

Some Stories

Caroline Oulton

Unsafe Attachments explores the relationships of a loosely interlinked group of Londoners. Caught off guard at key points, they face moments of sudden temptation in their busy, established lives, as well as increasingly difficult choices. 
 
Dinah, harried and pregnant, is haunted by images of death on her way to Heathrow. Abi, a senior civil servant, embarks upon an affair with a Nigerian journalist as her teenage daughter 'kind of shags' her teacher. Alex, increasingly keen to settle down, numbly accompanies his ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic. A glance at a party turns into a fumbling grope and then a guilty hangover for Roger, whose live-in girlfriend is smugly satisfied that her life is on course. Lonely café-owner Carey spots his married shrink passionately kissing another woman in a park while Tina's desperate wish for a child jeopardises everything that is important to her. 
 
Relationships are acutely observed - the delights and tensions of living together, cheating on one another and trying to make lasting connections in this vast modern city. Love - real or imaginary - causes hearts to crack and lives to crumble but there is also hope, and sometimes there are second chances.

Unsafe Attachments

Carys Bray

They say there's no place like home. It's where the heart is... 
 
Meet the little boy who believes in miracles. 
 
Meet the mother who loves to bring babies home from the newborn aisle of her supermarket. 
 
Meet the husband who carves a longed-for baby out of ice as a gift for his wife. 
 
Meet the widow who is reminded of romance whilst pegging out the washing. 
 
Awarded the Scott Prize for short story writing, Sweet Home weaves together moments of joy, heartache, sadness and unwavering love as told through seventeen very different notions of home.

Sweet Home

James Ellroy

A magisterial anthology of American noir writing in the 20th century by the best-selling author of the LA Quartet: The Black Dahlia. The Big Nowhere , LA Confidential and White Jazz. In his intoduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, "noir is the most scrutinised offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad." Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction. 
 
James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing - 1910-2010 - to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's "Pastorale," and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Patricia Highsmith and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

The Best American Noir of the Century

Sara Taylor

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD 2015 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES/PETERS FRASER &amp; DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 
 
The Shore. A collection of small islands sticking out from the coast of Virginia into the Atlantic Ocean that has been home to generations of fierce and resilient women. Sanctuary to some but nightmare to others, it’s a place they’ve inhabited, fled, and returned to for hundreds of years. 
 
The women are united by both small miracles and miseries: from a brave girl’s determination to protect her younger sister as methamphetamine ravages their family, to a lesson in summoning storm clouds to help end a drought. Their interconnected stories form a deeply affecting legacy of two island families bound not just by blood, but by fate.

The Shore

In The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Aimee Bender has created a world where nothing is quite as it seems. From a man suffering from reverse evolution to a lonely wife who waits for her husband to return from war; to a small town where one girl has a hand made of fire and another has one made of ice. These stories of men and women whose lives are shaped and sometimes twisted by the power of extraordinary desires take us to a place far beyond the imagination.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

'Echoes the magic of gothic forebears' FINANCIAL TIMES 
'Groff is a writer of rare gifts' NEW YORK TIMES 
'Lauren Groff is a virtuoso' Emily St John Mandel 
 
Delicate Edible Birds is a short story collection from acclaimed writer Lauren Groff. Spanning from 1910s New York to Second World War France and contemporary America, these dazzlingly varied stories full of fervour and insight cement Groff as one of the foremost talents of her generation. 
 
'One of the most original voices in literature today' ESQUIRE 
'A literary star' i NEWSPAPER

Delicate Edible Birds

And Other Stories

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