Anita Desai

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Jacqueline Harpman

From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human instinct: defiance. 
 
Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths. 
 
As part of her rigid shcooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe – her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportiante. 
 
Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own. 
 
In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape? 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

We Were Forbidden

Christopher Isherwood

Sally Bowles is the dazzling centrepiece of Goodbye to Berlin, distilling Isherwood's genius into the tale of one baudy, brilliant woman. 
 
1930s Berlin is a realm of glamour and sleaze, poverty and excess. There, a lonely young Brit working on a novel is charmed by an English runaway and want-to-be star, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles. The intimate, fleeting connection they form will stay with him for all his days. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

Sally Bowles

Eileen Chang

From one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century, these delicate stories illuminate the most intimate matters of the human heart - now available in English for the very first time. 
 
Since childhood, Ruliang has had the peculiar habit of sketching a certain profile in the margins of his books. He has mapped out this same face, over and over again, without knowing why - until he meets Cythnia. As brief and evocative as sketches themselves, these five stories of lost loves, nostalgia and migration reveal a master of feeling at the peak of her powers. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Young at the Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The classic, moving tale of a man born old, destined to die young, and live at odds with his time 
 
Born in the body of a 70-year-old man, Benjamin Button is cursed to live life in reverse. As he ages backwards, he embraces life, finds love and seeks out adventure, all while getting younger and younger. But time, however skewered, waits for no man, and even youth waits to rob Benjamin Button of the one rare thing we all share: life. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Louisa May Alcott

This is Alcott as you have never seen her before, sharp, gothic, and gloriously unsettling 
 
Jean Muir arrives at the wealthy Coventry household as a humble governess. But beneath her meek exterior lies a woman of steely ambition and dangerous cunning. What begins as a tale of domestic harmony turns swiftly into a drama of seduction, betrayal, and psychological gamesmanship. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Behind a Mask

Margaret Atwood

This miniature array of perfect stories by the legendary Margaret Atwood flash before us the joys and despairs of mothers good and bad, evoking laughter, compassion and recognition in us all. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother

Toni Cade Bambara

At once a gripping thriller and a heartbreaking elegy, this is Toni Cade Bambara's powerful final testament, a hymn to Atlanta's missing children. 
 
Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. Edited by Toni Morrison as part of Bambara's final novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, this slim masterpiece leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

First Light

Haruki Murakami

A nostalgic, jazz-soaked love-letter to a youth spent in pursuit of simple pleasures, from the Japan's most celebrated contemporary storyteller, Haruki Murakami 
 
Haunted by memories of a doomed love affair, and living in something of a strange hiatus in Tokyo, Pinball, 1973's narrator finds himself dreaming of the days he used to wile away playing pinball in J's Bar. Until one day he embarks on a quest: to find the exact model of pinball machine he played years earlier - the infamous three-flipper Spaceship. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Pinball, 1973

Herman Melville

Herman Melville's enduringly comic and affecting tale of a man who takes quiet quitting to extreme limits 
 
A new office clerk in a Wall Street lawyer's office is the cause for quiet dismay when he refuses to do his job. But how to deal with Bartleby, The Scrivener, especially when he refuses to leave the office altogether.... 
 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Bartleby, The Scrivener

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

In these stories of rebellion and sacrifice, ordinary lives burn with extraordinary courage 
 
Drawn from Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's collection Secret Lives and Other Stories this new selection gathers his most powerful tales of struggle and resilience. From fighters taking up arms against colonial rule to martyrs confronting impossible choices, these stories testify to the cost of freedom and the endurance of the human spirit. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Fighters & Martyrs

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's ghost stories whisper of passion, exile, and the things we cannot forget 
 
From bleak New England farms to glittering drawing rooms, Wharton summons hauntings that speak less of horror than of human yearning. This collection includes some of her most powerful supernatural tales, written with elegance and chill. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Bewitched

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Here, from Anita Desai to Salman Rushdie, are five books about families, India, marriage and the rest, to keep you going as the series moves on.

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