Heidi Perks is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Now You See Her, which was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, Come Back for Me, Three Perfect Liars, The Whispers and The Other Guest. The Last Resort is her sixth novel. Heidi is a voracious reader of crime and thrillers and is fascinated by the darker side of our closest relationships. Heidi lives in Bournemouth with her husband and two children.

Heidi Perks

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Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

This unique collection of medical stories approaches its theme from many eras and perspectives. Some of the authors included were themselves physicians, notably Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham and William Carlos Williams. Bulgakov, too, draws on his own experience as a doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story from Asylum Piece, takes a surreal look inside a Swiss psychiatric clinic, and Lorrie Moore's witty, grief-stricken Mother in 'People Like Us Are the Only People Here' examines the feelings of a parent with a child in the Paediatric Oncology war - 'Peed Onk'. Maupassant, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Graham Greene, O. Henry, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Dorothy Parker, Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro all feature. Doctors observe patients; patients observe doctors. Nurses go about their important business, not always appreciated. Not quite everyone is healed. The meaning of illness - does it have any? - and of life itself, is called into question - and all in the most entertaining way imaginable.

The Best Medicine

Stories of Healing

In this beautifully packaged anthology A. S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bowen, Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Anita Desai, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and many others reflect upon all aspects of motherhood in stories lyrical and satirical, realistic and fantastic, hilarious and heart-breaking. Here at last is a gift-book that is neither sentimental nor 'inspirational', offering instead high-quality literary fiction which will continue to entertain long after the chocolates have been eaten and the flowers thrown away.

Stories of Motherhood

The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling's heroically faithful 'Garm', Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a 'yaller dog' and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs in Jonathan Lethem's 'Ava's Apartment'. Here are stories which touchingly illuminate the dog's role in the emotional lives of humans, such as Tobias Wolff's 'Her Dog', where a widower shares his grief for his wife with her grieving pet. Here, too, are humorous glimpses of the canine point of view, from O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape to P. G. Wodehouse's cheerfully naïve watchdog who simply wants everybody to get along. These writers and others - Ray Bradbury, JamesThurber and Penelope Lively among them - offer imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman's most devoted companion

Dog Stories

This wide-ranging anthology pays tribute to fathers young and old. At one end of the spectrum, a touching story by Ann Packer tells of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child’s birth, and from Frank O’Connor’s comes a hilarious tale of a small boy’s war against his paternal rival in ‘My Oedipus Complex’. At the other, John Updike’s ‘My Father’s Tears’ and Jim Shepard’s ‘The Mortality of Parents’ bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other. Maupassant, Kakfa, Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Raymond Carver, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Helen Simpson …all these and more offer a wonderful assortment of fictional takes on the paternal bond.

Stories of Fatherhood

A glorious collection of some of the best sleuths in the business. Including creators such as Poe and Conan Doyle to Hammet, Christie, Chandler, Rendell and Rankin. Perfect gift edition.

Detective Stories

Momentous parties have long provided dramatic scenes in fiction, from Natasha’s first ball in War and Peace to Lizzie meeting Darcy in Pride and Prejudice to J. Edgar Hoover consorting with Truman Capote in Don DeLillo’s ‘The Black and White Ball’. 
 
Revelry can be revealing of character, as in Jay Gatsby’s extravagant bash in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the decadent partying of the jaded expats in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. More decorous affairs can conceal profound depths, as in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and the parties at the centre of two modernist masterpieces, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Glamour with a gothic twist makes an appearance here in the fancy dress ball at Manderley from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, at which Death himself is a guest. 
 
But there is room on this dance floor for humour as well, in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Arrangement in Black & White’, Saki's ‘A Boar Pig’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pnin Gives a Party’. All kinds of literary greats consort in this festive gathering, a perfect gift for readers and partygoers alike.

Party Stories

A perfect gift of timeless erotic stories ranging from ancient Greek myth to modern stories of longing and lust. This beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology has a full-cloth binding and silk ribbon marker. Accounts of ardour and transgression also flow from unexpected pens: an astonishingly explicit scene from an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant's heated tale of a young peasant woman offering her breast to a starving stranger on a train. Hunger is the fierce undercurrent to these stories: the gnawing lust of one lover for another, or the greedy pursuit of a particular inclination. The elegant depravity of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, the dreamlike seductions of an Egyptian jinni in the form of a snake, the brutal anonymity of a highway truck-stop encounter--the stories in this richly varied collection reveal that the urge to articulate sexual desire is as inventive as it is timeless.

Erotic Stories

Horse Stories corrals two centuries of short fiction about the most majestic of domesticated animals. From writers old and new come stories of magnificent stallions, broken-down nags, racehorses, ponies, cowboy's steeds, workhorses, and beloved companions, in a wide variety of literary styles. Rudyard Kipling transports us the polo fields of India, Bret Harte to the ranches of the Wild West. Arthur Conan Doyle makes a famous thoroughbred disappear (or does he?), while Saki spins an amusing yarn about a notorious bolter. Isaac Babel tells of the horrors of war; Raymond Carver has a vision of runaway horses in the mist; Ted Hughes, Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley explore the human passions horses can unleash. From the rollicking racetrack humour of Damon Runyon to the poignant lyricism of John Steinbeck, these stories testify to our varied and timeless fascination with the noblest of animals. A perfect gift.

Horse Stories

Playful kittens and ruthless predators, beloved pets and witches' familiars - cats of all kinds come alive in these stories. Maeve Brennan and Alice Adams movingly explore what cats can mean to their humans, while writers as varied as Patricia Highsmith and Fritz Leiber imagine the intriguingly alien feline point of view. Cats flaunt their undeniable superiority in Angela Carter's bawdy retelling of 'Puss-in-Boots' and Stephen Vincent Benét's uncanny 'The King of the Cats', while humour abounds in tales by comic masters P. G. Wodehouse and Saki. The essential unknowableness of cats inspires the most exotic flights of fancy: Calvino's secret city of cats in 'The Garden of Stubborn Cats', the disappearing animal in Ursula K. LeGuin's brain-teasing 'Schrödinger's Cat', the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser's 'Cat 'n' Mouse'. In these and other stories, this delightful anthology offers cat lovers a many-faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their affection.

Cat Stories

Saki

Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gleefully skewer the pompous hypocrisies of upper-class Edwardian society. But they go beyond mere satire, raising dark humour to extremes of entertaining outrageousness that have rarely since been matched. Saki's elegantly mischievous young heroes sow chaos in their wake without breaking a sweat, occasionally assisted by werewolves, tigers, eavesdropping house pets and casually murderous children. This selection of over fifty stories includes such favourites as 'Tobermory', 'The Open Window', 'Sredni Vashtar', 'Mrs Packletide's Tiger', 'The Schartz-Metterklume Method', and many more.

Selected Stories

Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together. 
An array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of Lawrence and Colette to the wickedlycynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Nabokov's 'That in Aleppo Once ...' to romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald's 'Winter Dreams'. Objects of passion range from a glamorous silent-movie star in Elizabeth Bowen's haunting 'Dead Mabelle' to a faithful ghost in Kawabata's 'Immortality' and a successful heart surgeon and serial husband in Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebeard's Egg'. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the depths of a couple sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a husband and wife brought together by it. 
Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Maupassant, Calvino and T. C. Boyle convey the elemental force of love in extremely different ways. 
Together these nineteen stories make an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life. Perfect for Valentine's Day.

Love Stories

John Updike

In an interview, Updike once said, "If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories." These stories were originally published in The New Yorker and then in various collections before Vintage first put them together in one volume in 1964, as a paperback original. They follow the life of one character from the age of ten through manhood, in the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger (pronounced, according to Updike, with a long O and a hard G), which was loosely based on Updike's own hometown. "All the stories draw from the same autobiographical well," Updike explained, "the only child, the small town, the grandparental home, the move in adolescence to a farm." The selection was made and arranged by Updike himself, and was prefaced by a lovely 1,400-word essay by the author that has never been reprinted in full elsewhere until now.

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