Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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J M Coetzee

After his piano recital in Barcelona, Witold Walczykiewicz – white-haired virtuoso, controversial interpreter of Chopin – becomes infatuated with Beatriz, his designated companion at dinner. Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, is at first unmoved. But as the stranger’s letters, music, and poetry flood into her home, a dream of love begins that surprises them both.

The Pole and Other Stories

Alice Munro

Alice Munro turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantly imagined version of the past. 
 
&lsquo;One of my very favourite writers&rsquo; Claire Tomalin 
 
From her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in 1950s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

The View from Castle Rock

Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant stories about Native Americans who find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads. In 'The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above', an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her, to the bewilderment of her only child. In 'Do You Know Where I Am?' two college sweethearts rescue a lost cat - a simple act that has profound moral consequences for the rest of their lives together. In 'What You Pawn I Will Redeem', a homeless Indian man must raise $1,000 in twenty-four hours to buy back the fancy dance outfit stolen from his grandmother fifty years earlier. 
 
Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candour that cut to the heart of the human experience.

Ten Little Indians

Irvine Welsh

Rebecca Navarro, best-selling authoress of Regency romances, suffers a paralysing stroke. Assisted by her nurse, Rebecca plans her revenge on her unfaithful husband. But will Freddy Royle, hospital trustee, celebrity and necrophiliac, thwart those plans? Dave Thornton, soccer thug, has lost his heart to flawed beauty Samantha Worthington. Together they go in search of the man who marketed the drug that crippled her - in order to cripple him. Lloyd from Leith has a transfiguring passion for the unhappily married Heather. Together they explore the true nature of house music and chemical romance. Will their ardour fizzle and die in the grim backstreets of Edinburgh, or will it ignite and blaze like a thousand suns?

Ecstasy

Three Tales of Chemical Romance

Charles McLeod

A man puts pieces of his life up for auction. An antique chess set played with a troubled brother ($99.99), number plates from a crashed stolen car ($20), Chuck Taylor trainers worn in a riot in Seattle ($8.99). Along with a short description, he tells their stories, how they fit into the tapestry of his life. 
 
In National Treasures men and women measure out their lives in tattoos, sharpened fragments of a moose’s hoof, autumn leaves, scribbled phone numbers, the red eyes of a heron. This is the America we never see – it’s not in the movies, or on the news. 
 
National Treasures is about people trying to get by and get on. These can be tough lives of tough love and tough luck but they are full of poignancy and intensity, and Charles McLeod writes about them thrillingly.

National Treasures

Rachel Seiffert

Rachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room, powerfully evokes our need for human connection in this brilliant and haunting group of stories. From the title piece, in which a young biologist conceals his discoveries at a polluted river from a local woman, to the family aided by an enemy in 'The Crossing', to the old man weighing his regrets in 'Francis John Jones, 1924 -' Seiffert's acclaimed, refined prose movingly captures the lives of her characters in their most essential, secret moments. 
 
A Rocky Mountain News Best Book of the Year.

Field Study

Tessa Hadley

The new collection of short stories from award-winning author Tessa Hadley. 
 
Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior.It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing collection to treasure.

Married Love

Margaret Atwood

The new collection from the legendary Atwood is led by the story of a married couple as they travel the road together, the moments big and small that make up a long life of love -- and what comes after 
 
My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, ‘My heart is broken.’ We say, ‘Are there any cookies?’ 
 
In this dazzling collection of stories we meet beloved cats, George Orwell, a daughter whose mother may or may not be a witch, a cabal of elderly female academics, and an alien tasked with retelling human fairy tales. And we meet and re-meet Nell and Tig, a long-married couple, and see the moments big and small that make up a life of love – and what comes after. 
 
 
'She's Margaret Atwood, and she can do anything' Ann Patchett 
 
'There is no greater living writer' Daily Telegraph 
 
'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times 
 
'A living legend' New York Times Book Review

Old Babes in the Wood

Amos Oz

Eight interlinked family dramas set on an Israeli kibbutz from the masterful storyteller behind A Tale of Love and Darkness 
 
 
‘On the kibbutz it’s hard to know. We’re all supposed to be friends but very few really are’ 
 
 Ariella, unhappy in love, confides in the woman whose husband she stole. 
 
 Nahum, a devoted father, can’t find the words to challenge his daughter’s promiscuous lover. 
 
 The old idealists deplore the apathy of the young, while the young are so used to kibbutz life that they can’t work out if they’re impassioned or indifferent. 
 
In this short story collection Amos Oz reveals the secrets and frustrations of the human heart 
 
‘Lucid and heartbreaking’ Guardian

Between Friends

Mary Morrissy

‘A wonderful writer’ Hilary Mantel 
 
All of life is laid bare in Prosperity Drive. A woman falls and remembers a moment decades earlier that changed the course of her life. A failed priest teaches children to swim at the YMCA. A teenage girl takes a spanner to the car of the young man who has driven her home. A honeymoon in Venice goes disastrously wrong. A man is reunited with his first love in an airport departure lounge. All of the characters begin their journeys on Prosperity Drive, appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory in this mesmerising book.

Prosperity Drive

Henry Shukman

Jim Rogers once had everything: a successful career, the love of a beautiful woman, a Manhattan penthouse and more money than he knew what to do with. Now it had all gone wrong and he was in a seedy hotel in Panama realising that the prostitute he'd just been with had stolen his wallet. Though it wasn't the money he was worried about but a sheet of folded paper, which he'd just been given by the mysterious Albert Jones: a piece of paper that might have saved his life. The search for the girl and the stolen document lead the two men deep into the Darien archipelago - a primitive, treacherous idyll that seems like Paradise but may in fact be Hell. 
 
The short novel, Darien Dogs, and the four stories that accompany it, mark the fictional debut of an assured and thrillingly gifted writer.

Darien Dogs

A.L. Kennedy

'Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading' Sunday Times 
 
Humour, fantasy, rage and despair both help and hinder the protagonists of these stories as they navigate changing circumstances, accumulating losses, moments of comprehension and tenderness. Here is the woman, hoping for a quiet day at the zoo, who finally snaps at a white man's racist tirade and vents years of fury; the micro-celebrity who practises lines for a chat show on which he'll never appear; and the woman who walks out of her honeymoon suite at midnight, perhaps for good. Unsparing in her close examination of human relationships, A. L. Kennedy proves once again why she is regarded as one of our great storytellers. 
 
'Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thoughts... Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear-cut and yet capable of great tenderness' Observer 
 
'An author with a proven ability to see - truly see - and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page' New Statesman

We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time

Emma Cline

'Taut, beautiful and savage' Guardian 
 
A man travels to his son's school to deal with the fallout of a violent attack and to make sure his son will not lose his college place. But what exactly has his son done? And who is to blame? 
 
A young woman trying to make it in LA, working in a clothes shop while taking acting classes, turns to a riskier way of making money but will be forced to confront the danger of the game she's playing. 
 
And a family coming together for Christmas struggle to skate over the lingering darkness caused by the very ordinary brutality of a troubled husband and father. 
 
 Subtle, sophisticated and displaying an extraordinary understanding of human behaviour, these stories from the best-selling author of The Girls are unforgettable. 
______________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR DADDY: 
'It is her piercing understanding of modern humiliation that makes these stories vibrate with life...brilliant' Brandon Taylor 
'Razor-sharp' Evening Standard 
'Cline's talent at uncovering the seedy and somehow bringing it to beautiful light is brilliant' Daisy Johnson 
'Something about Cline's intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, is entirely and uniquely her own' Rachel Kushner 
'A stunning collection of stories that plunges deep into the dark corners of the human experience' Dazed

Daddy

Rose Tremain

A seductive collection of stories from the 'magnificent story-teller' (Independent on Sunday). Rose Tremain has sold over one million copies of her books. 
 
Trapped in a London flat, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor. 
 
‘Superb, each story a perfectly cut jewel’ Irish Times

The American Lover

Elizabeth McCracken

'One of my favourite writers' Nick Hornby 
 
One of the most acclaimed writers of our day, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date. 
 
A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children's game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half-brother. And on a trip to a water park with their son, two fathers each confront a deep-rooted personal fear. With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken shows how the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. 
 
'McCracken has a gift for spotting the comic potential in situations many of us have endured... Her prose is stippled with just-so observations' Observer 
 
'McCracken is a totally assured performer: even seemingly throwaway perceptions are often memorably poetic, and there is a hint of melancholy under the comedy' Sunday Times 
 
'This incisive, warm-blooded collection of stories is populated by outsiders... McCracken illuminates qualities of human nature through fragments of her characters' lives' New Yorker

The Souvenir Museum

**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS PICK** 
 
Previously published as 'The Beggar Maid', Alice Munro's wonderful collection of stories reads like a novel, following Rose's life as she moves away from her impoverished roots and forges her own path in the world. 
 
Born into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her practical and shrewd stepmother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside. But Rose was ambitious - she won a scholarship and left for Toronto where she married Patrick. She was his Beggar Maid, 'meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet', and he was her knight, content to sit and adore her. 
 
'A work of great brilliance and depth... almost Proustian in its sureness' New Statesman 
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Who Do You Think You Are?

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach. 
 
Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

Sunstroke and Other Stories

Irène Némirovsky

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Le Bal is a sharp, brittle story of a girl who sets out to ruin the mother she hates. The Kampfs have risen swiftly up the ranks of 1930s Parisian society. Painfully aware of her working-class roots, and desperate to win acceptance, Madame Kampf decides to throw a huge ball to announce her arrival to society. Her daughter Antoinette, who has just turned fourteen, dreams of attending, but Madame Kampf is resolved not to present her daughter to potential admirers. In a fury of adolescent rage and despair, Antoinette exacts a swift and horrible revenge... 
 
Snow in Autumn pays homage to Némirovsky's beloved Chekhov and chronicles the life of a devoted servant following her masters as they flee Revolutionary Moscow and emigrate to a life of hardship in Paris. As the crisis pushes the family to the brink of dissolution, Tatiana struggles to adapt to life in Paris and waits in vain for her cherished first snow of autumn.

Le Bal

K-Ming Chang

*WINNER OF THE 2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR LESBIAN FICTION* 
 
*A New York Times 100 Notable Book of 2022* 
 
'These stories glitter and pulse' Dantiel W. Montiz 
 
In her singular, electrifying style, K-Ming Chang peels back questions of body, power and identity, and the relationships of Asian American women, with vivid imagination. 
 
A stream of women adjust to American life by sneaking kisses from women at temple and buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests. Ghost-cousins cross space, seas and skies to haunt their living cousin. Two girls explore each other's bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark. 
 
Brimming with moths and mothers, nine-headed birds and storm-chasers, these queer, fabulist tales delve viscerally into myth and memory, corporeality and ghostliness, beauty and the grotesque. 
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR in New York Times, NPR, Them and Book Riot, from the National Book Award '5 under 35' honoree and author of Bestiary. 
 
'Wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!' Sharlene Teo 
 
'A voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be' New York Times 
 
'Stunning and moving... One of our most brilliant authors' Bryan Washington

Gods of Want

A New York Times Notable Book of 2022

Kurt Vonnegut

Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In "Confido," a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In "Ed Luby's Key Club," a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the Birdie," a quack psychiatrist turned "murder counsellor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. 
 
Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style

Look at the Birdie

Bernard MacLaverty

Any book of stories from Bernard MacLaverty is a cause for celebration, but Matters of Life and Death is more than that, as it is - without question - one of the finest contemporary examples of the short story as a genre. 
 
Beginning with the sudden, nauseating terror of a family caught up in an explosion of shocking sectarian violence and ending with the white-out of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear, Matters of Life and Death is a book about bonds and connections, made and broken, secret and known. Vivid, beautifully controlled and written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are object lessons in the art of short fiction.

Matters of Life & Death

A.L. Kennedy's fifth collection of short stories show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. Her characters are perfectly ordinary people - whose marriages founder; who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger or who order a luxurious meal as their lives fall apart - but the stories she weaves around them are truly remarkable. 
 
She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the redemption and the love - and she does so with enormous human compassion and leaps of black humour. 
 
From the winner of the Costa Book Award for Day.

What Becomes

Christopher Tilghman

This superb new collection of stories confirms Tilghman's genius in that edgy territory of family, marriage breakdown, widowhood, parents, children, inheritance and escape, all against a backdrop of richly evoked landscapes from Virginia to Montana. Like Richard Ford, Tilghman unpeals the corner of the male psyche to expose, with empathy and yet a touch of ironic distance, the vulnerabilities which make men run, or lie - or even come back for good.Here are ordinary people - men, for the most part - running from their loves, looking for new hope in a 'bushel of crabs', a cattle ranch, a one-night stand or a whisky glass. But here, too, in these sharply focused and beautifully judged stories are moments of redemption, moments when they stop running and find love, or just a glimmer of self-knowledge.

The Way People Run

The twelve stories in Indelible Acts are variations on a theme of longing - the unassuagable human need for contact, for completion, for that most fugitive gift of all: reciprocal love. Its characters' lives are thwarted, dashed, impassioned, each in their own way immolated by hope. A queue outside a cheese shop leads to a thrilling infidelity; a crematorium funeral exposes a love gone sour; a foreign hotel room becomes a diorama of despair as physical sickness becomes a metaphor for incurable grief. In the title story, two lovers confront their lusts amid the ruins of Rome; in 'A Bad Son' a young boy from a damaged home searches for some kind of peace in the newly fallen snow.

Indelible Acts

John Burnside

In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment. 
 
These are people for whom the idea of ‘home’ has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe – and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children's picture book. As he says in one story, ‘All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.’ But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending. 
 
‘There is no telling what kind of gifts one of John Burnside’s wonderful sentences will contain.’ Anne Enright

Something Like Happy

Helen Simpson

In this stellar collection of short stories, Helen Simpson explores independence, solitude, marriage, sex and babies with her characteristic blend of comedy and lyricism. Here are tales of young love - successful or thwarted, intense or comic. 
 
 From a wedding day for one, through the knotty problems of babies, their conception, arrival and impact on adult lives, to a Lothario receiving his just deserts, and the title story, where a schoolgirl's erotic daydreams during her Shakespeare homework go on to produce blushes of horror.

Dear George and Other Stories

Martin Amis

An ex-circus strongman, veteran of Warsaw, 1939, and Notting Hill rough-justice artist, meets his own personal holocaust and 'Einsteinian' destiny; maximum boredom and minimum love-making are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a 'father of the nuclear age'; evolution takes a rebarbative turn in a Kafkaesque love story; and the history of the earth is frankly discussed by one who has witnessed it all. 
 
The stories in this collection form a unity and reveal a deep preoccupation: '"Einstein's Monsters" refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves,' writes Amis in his enlightening introductory essay, 'We are Einstein's monsters: not fully human, not for now.'

Einstein's Monsters

Exposing and exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish and love, A.L. Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy and the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family adn the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed.

Now That You're Back

A masterful collection of short stories from the prize-winning and bestselling Rose Tremain. 
 
Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American for whom Edward Vlll abdicated the throne, is on her deathbed in her Paris flat, closely guarded by her lawyer who will not allow her any visitors. An East German border guard, redundant after the fall of the Berlin Wall, tries to reach Russia by bicycling across the hostile wastes of Poland.A jilted man gets his revenge. A baby grows wings. A character in an Impressionist painting escapes from his ‘frame’ – or does he? 
 
‘Moving and tragic... The darkness of Rose Tremain is never far from the surface in this brilliantly written short story collection’ Daily Express 
 
‘Classic, breathtaking Tremain’ Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year 
 
‘Mordantly perceptive tales’ Sunday Times

The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

Susan Hill

A young school boy visiting his aunt's country house finds company and friendship with the gentle beekeeper and begins teaching the man to read, so that it seems nothing can ever intrude upon their closeness. A young country girl fights against becoming a downtrodden domestic skivvy like her dead mother, while another young girl reaches a delicate understanding with an elderly blind man as they walk along the beach together. On another beach a more sinister plot unfolds as a gang of boys plans the most wicked deed.

The Boy Who Taught The Beekeeper To Read

and Other Stories

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