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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John Steinbeck

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Roark is a bad man. His pig is a bad pig. They match in devilish temperament and violent deeds. Roark laughs at a drowned monk; his pig eats its own young and turns a boar sterile. As a spiteful tithe, the pig is given to the local monastery. The pig becomes a Christian. The pig is Saint Katy the Virgin. Fantastical and farcical, this short story parodies religious tropes and stereotypes. With a lively imagination and piercing wit, John Steinbeck delivers an absurd tale that amuses and entertains whilst asking powerful, revealing questions.

Saint Katy the Virgin

Isak Dinesen

'And it happened when Martine or Philippa spoke to Babette that they would get no answers, and would wonder if she had even heard what they said ... Orshe would sit immovable on the three-legged kitchen chair, her strong hands in her lap and her dark eyes wide open, as enigmatical and fatal as a Pythia upon her tripod. At such moments, they realised that Babette was deep, and that in the soundings of her being there were passions, there were memories and longings of which they knew nothing at all.' 
 
Babette's Feast is a sublime celebration of eating, drinking and sensual pleasure. In Isak Dinesen's life-affirming short story, two elderly sisters living in a remote, god-fearing Norwegian community take in a mysterious refugee from Paris one night - and are rewarded for their kindness with the most decadent, luxurious feast of a lifetime.

Babette's Feast

Raymond Chandler

'I pushed her back into the house without saying anything, shut the door. We stood looking at each other inside. She dropped her hand slowly and tried to smile. Then all expression went out of her white face and it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box...I lit my cigarette, puffed it slowly for a moment and then asked: "What are you doing here?" 
 
Before creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler perfected the hardboiled private detective story in the pages of Blask Mask magazine - tough, spare tales of gumshoes and murder, laced with a weary lyricism and deadpan, laconic wit. 'Killer in the Rain' is vintage Chandler, the groundwork for his classic first novel The Big Sleep.

Killer in the Rain

Angela Carter

'Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.' 
 
Angela Carter's playful and subversive retellings of Charles Perrault's classic fairy tales conjure up a world of resourceful women, black-hearted villains, wily animals and incredible transformations. In these seven stories, bristling with frank, earthy humour and gothic imagination, nothing is as it seems. 
 
This book includes Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, Cinderella: or, The Glass Slipper, Ricky with the Tuft and The Foolish Wishes.

Bluebeard

Tove Ditlevsen

Unable to stay on to high school, Tove starts her first job (which lasts only one day) and soon embarks on a varied and chequered career: as au pair, cleaner, stock-room assistant and office worker. But Tove is hungry, for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As she navigates exploitative bosses, uninspiring boyfriends and a Nazi landlady, she struggles to keep her poetic vocation in sight - until she finally realizes the 'miracle' that she has always dreamed of. 
 
The second volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Youth is a sensitive, often funny and almost painfully truthful portrayal of adolescence.

Youth

Shirley Jackson

At a post-war suburban party, a man retreats to the kitchen and unexpectedly meets a teenage girl. There is the usual coffee and small talk, but then the conversation takes a startling turn. He resists it with condescending statements, but she calmly persists, and visions of a post-apocalyptic America follow one after another - destruction and chaos coolly, but vividly, described by her youthful voice. 
Shirley Jackson's ability to create a sense of unease is masterfully displayed in this commonplace but haunting exchange. Blending horror with the ordinary, it disrupts the comfort of the familiar and introduces a lurking disquiet that endures well beyond the close of the conversation.

The Intoxicated

Life in Tove's neighbourhood in Copenhagen is confusing and difficult: her father can't find work, her mother is angry and remote, and Tove herself sometimes thinks she's been exchanged at birth. But 'inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul' and she soon realizes that she has a vocation, something unknowable and secret within, and that if she can only find the right words, she will one day succeed in forging a true life of her own - somewhere beyond the narrow streets of her childhood. 
 
The first volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Childhood captures the triumphs and tragedies of girlhood with intense vividness and a poet's clarity of vision.

Childhood

Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, but she has no idea of the struggles that lie ahead - love affairs, an unwanted pregnancy, physical pain and crippling opioid addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living life freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms. 
 
The final volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy and perhaps her masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

Dependency

'Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle...' 
 
 
The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these five tales of casual cruelty by a master of the short story. Portraying insanity, disturbing encounters, troubling children and a sinister lottery, Shirley Jackson's work has an unmatched power to unnerve and unsettle. 
 
This book includes The Tooth, The Witch, Charles, The Lottery and The Intoxicated.

The Tooth

Elisa Allen is tending her chrysanthemums. Strong, with a handsome face she skilfully and proudly cultivates the best in the valley. Tonight, her husband is taking her to town. While she works, a squeak of heels and a plod of hoofs bring a curious vehicle, curiously drawn: a tradesman looking for directions and a job. He is met with curt replies and a hardened resistance. Then he notices her chrysanthemums. 
 With his characteristic insight and evocative language, John Steinbeck creates a short story of a brief but striking encounter. Set in Salinas Valley, where he grew up, it dissects the myriad complexities of humanity, society and hidden longings.

The Chrysanthemums

Margaret Drabble

'Her feelings for the child redeemed her from bitterness, and shed some light on the dark industrial terraces and the waste lands of the city's rubble.' 
 
One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, Margaret Drabble is an unmatched observer of postwar English lives, portraying social change, sexual liberation, landscape, class and the messy complications of human relationships with intricacy and honesty. In these two stories of lives colliding, a mother buying a birthday gift has her dreams destroyed, and a honeymoon leads to an unexpected epiphany. 
 
This book contains The Gifts of War and Hassan's Tower.

The Gifts of War

John Updike

John Updike's fictional antihero, Henry Bech, could not be more different from his creator. A self-confessed composite of Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger, he cannot help but flatter himself. In this 'foreword' Updike presents us with a conceited and satirical manifestation of what it means to be an American and a writer.

Foreword

Anna Kavan

The world is threatened by encroaching ice, creeping down day by day from the polar ice caps. The imminent catastrophe has thrown the world's governments into chaos, and no one knows whether the disaster has an environmental or nuclear cause, or how soon the end will come. One man pursues his sylph-like, silver-haired ex-fiancée ('the girl') as she flees from country to country, away from her husband; away from the malevolent 'warden' of one of the proto-territories that have sprung up as traditional societies crumble; away from him.

Robert Coover

'She arrives at 7.40, ten minutes late...' She babysits for Mr and Mrs Tucker. She has left a boyfriend alone for the evening. From this seemingly simple start Robert Coover masterfully explores the subtle barrier between 'reality' and thought. As the babysitter triggers the men's sexual fantasies, their erotic imaginations twist into alternative narratives simultaneously experienced by the reader: she does or does not take a bath; she does or does not invite her boyfriend over; she does or does not get caught unawares by Mr Tucker. In a profusion of happenings and imaginings, Coover layers moment upon moment, narrative upon narrative, to shatter the timeline of one evening into a multiplicity of events - contradictory, simultaneous, but all equally 'real'.

The Babysitter

Using details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that were the inspiration for Hamlet, John Updike brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair with her husband's younger brother. As only he could, Updike recasts a tale of medieval violence and presents the case for its central couple that Shakespeare only hinted at.  Gertrude's warmth and lucidity, Claudius's soldierly yet peaceable powers of command are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and familial dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, disaffected prince.

Gertrude And Claudius

Vladimir Nabokov

'Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull'. With his senses wide open, Victor wanders the streets. He meets Nina. Again. For fifteen years, their fleeting, chance encounters have made Nina a faint but constant presence in the margins of his life. As they happen upon one another once again, his mind wanders back into the past and relives each brief memory: their kiss in Russia, when she met his wife, when he met her husband, their affair in Paris. Each time she captivated him, each time she seemed to almost forget him, each time he noticed a lurking sense of apprehension that began to grow.

Spring in Fialta

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

'There once lived a woman who was so fat, she couldn't fit in a taxi, and when going into the subway she took up the whole width of the escalator' 
 
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been acclaimed as one of Russia's greatest living writers. These five dreamlike and blackly comic stories, two of which are here in English for the first time, tell of lost children, midnight forests, strange transformations, cruel curses, grief and resilience, in the darkest of modern fairy tales. 
 
This book contains Through the Wall and Anna and Maria.

Through the Wall

A four-year-old boy sits on a train with his mother and his baby sister. The mother attends to the baby. The little boy daydreams. An elderly man with a pleasant face joins the carriage. He asks, "Do you love your sister?" An ordinary question asked by an ordinary man. He continues, "I had a little sister... I took her and put my hands around her neck and I pinched her and I pinched her until she was dead." 
 Playing with the line between fact and fiction, Shirley Jackson's short story is disruptive and shocking, yet oddly familiar and reminiscent. It disturbs the commonplace, probing the façade of the everyday to question exactly just of what people are capable.

The Witch

After multiple postings in various armies, Nikolay Galatov, an itinerant soldier, is living in Berlin. Every now and then he remembers Olga Kind, a woman he left behind in St. Petersburg seven years ago. He decides to go and find her. 
 
Filled with teasing plot lines, misrepresentations and narrative traps, The Doorbell is an exploration of character, interaction and awkward suspense. Once again examining the themes of loss, separation and exile, Vladimir Nabokov weaves a tale of unexpected turnings and non-happenings, playing with the conventions of traditional, predictable fiction.

The Doorbell

Emmanuel Carrère

Limonov is not a fictional character, but he could have been. He's lived a hundred lives. He was a hoodlum in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, punk-poet and valet to a billionaire in Manhattan, fashion writer in Paris, lost soldier in the Balkans, and now, in the chaos after the fall of communism a charismatic party leader of a gang of political desperados.

Limonov

Virginia Woolf

'People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.' 
 
'If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand - the imagination.' 
 
Virginia Woolf's writing tested the boundaries of modern fiction, exploring the depths of human consciousness and creating a new language of sensation and thought. Sometimes impressionistic, sometimes experimental, sometimes brutally cruel, sometimes surprisingly warm and funny, these five stories describe love lost, friendships formed and lives questioned. 
 
This book includes The Lady in the Looking Glass, A Society, The Mark on the Wall, Solid Objects and Lappin and Lapinova.

The Lady in the Looking Glass

Donald Barthelme

'I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.' 
 
Donald Barthelme is a puckish player with language, a writer of short but endlessly rewarding comic gems, a thinker and an experimenter. In these nine short stories, whether writing about a hairy, donkeyish king or a touching, private gesture of city-sized proportions, his is a surreal, deadpan genius. 
 
This book includes Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, The Glass Mountain, I Bought a Little City, The Palace at Four A.M., Chablis, The School, Margins, Game and The Balloon.

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Eileen Chang

There were two women in Zhenbao's life: one he called his white rose, the other his red rose. One was a spotless wife, the other a passionate mistress. Isn't that just how the average man describe a chaste widow's devotion to her husband's memory - as spotless, and passionate too? Maybe every man has had two such women - at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is "moonlight in front of my bed." Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart. 
 
In Eileen Chang's eloquent and evocative novella, Zhenbao is a devoted son, a diligent worker, and 
guarded in love. But when he meets a friend's spoilt, spirited, desirable wife, he cannot resist her charms, or keep their relationship under his control. As he succumbs to passions and resentments, Red Rose, White Rose is both sensual and restrained.

Red Rose, White Rose

Patrizia Cavalli

Two hours ago I fell in love 
and trembled, and tremble still, 
and haven't a clue whom I should tell. 
 
Any hall she reads her poetry in is invariably filled to the gills. In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wislawa Szymborska is in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she'd be designated a national treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written 'the most intensely ethical poetry in Italian literature of the 20th century'. One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, she remains little known in Britain; My Poems Won't Change the World is the first substantial gathering of translations of her work into the English language. 
 
The book is made up of poems from Cavalli's collections published by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, here translated by an illustrious group of poets including Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi and Gini Alhadeff. Thoughtful, sly and full of life, these are poems of the self, the body, pasta, cats, the city traversed on foot or by car, and - always, and above all - love.

My Poems Won't Change the World

Varlam Shalamov

Narrated in the first person, this short story is one episode in the life of a Russian labour-camp inmate. Written by Varlam Shalamov after his own experiences at a gulag, it describes the apathy of prisoners as they steadily approach death, the assuredness of betrayal and duplicity, and the constant craving for material satisfaction to lessen the empty, scorched feeling inside. When an old acquaintance lays out an escape plan, that satisfaction is offered in the form of condensed milk: a sweet, delicious extravagance - a small element of joy in the midst of impending death.

Condensed Milk

These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well known tales, &lsquo;Babette&rsquo;s Feast&rsquo;, which was made into the classic film. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. There is also a real-life Prospero and his Ariel in &lsquo;Tempests&rsquo;, a mysterious pearl-fisher in &lsquo;The Diver&rsquo; and a brief, tragic encounter in &lsquo;The Ring&rsquo;. All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate. They were among the last to be written by Isak Dinesen, and show her as a master of short fiction.

Anecdotes of Destiny

Georges Simenon

A new translation of Simenon's gripping novel about lives transformed by deceit and the destructive power of lust. 
 
It was all real: himself, the room, Andrée still lying on the ravaged bed. 
 
For Tony and Andrée, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate - and dangerous. Soon it turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape. Simenon's stylish and sensual psychological thriller weaves a story of cruelty, reckless lust and relentless guilt. 
 
'A wondrous achievement, brief, inexorable, pared to, and agonisingly close to, the bone, and utterly compelling; in short, a true and luminous work of art.' John Banville 
 
'A double crime, a dark provincial scandal, and a dreadful sort of triumph . . . presented with shattering power' San Francisco Chronicle 
 
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 
 
'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

The Blue Room

Paul Bowles

In the Circular Valley lives a spirit, a mute presence: Atlajala. Thirsting for sensation, this spirit enters a moth, a panther, an eel, and feels what they feel - the cool darkness of water, the pleasure of a kill. Centuries old and indifferent to time, it enters man and discovers obsession for the first time. Yearning to be incarnate as man, it enters priests, soldiers and bandits. When an adulterous couple arrives in the valley, it slips into a woman. Finally, it feels complete. But as it possesses her, she grows restless and extreme, and her affair takes a darker, more sinister turn.

The Circular Valley

Written by one of the most lauded Chinese writers of the twentieth century, this bijou story focuses around the relationship between Mr and Mrs Mi and compares their bond of love with the sense of care they feel for the elderly Mrs Yang. A subtle examination of the fragile ties that bind us to those whom we love and those for whom we find ourselves caring along the way.

Traces of Love

Eudora Welty

'"Watch out for the mosquitoes," they called to one another, lyrically because warning wasn't any use anyway, as they walked out of their kimonos and dropped them like the petals of one big scattered flower on the bank behind them, and exposing themselves felt in a hundred places at once the little pangs.' 
 
Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty's extraordinary short story is a lushly atmospheric and acutely observed portrayal of the strange, surreal time between childhood and adulthood.

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