Nigella Lawson has written eleven bestselling cookery books including the classics How to Eat and How To Be A Domestic Goddess – the book that inspired a whole new generation of bakers. These books, and her TV series, have made her a household name around the world. 
 
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Nigella Lawson

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Julian Barnes

Major 'Jacko' Jackson, now retired, takes his yearly, self-appointed furlough to London. But time has moved on, and the kitchenware on the itemised task list his wife has provided him with is not the only thing he finds out of stock. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection The Lemon Table.

Hygiene (Storycuts)

A. S. Byatt

Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two little girls, extracted from their homes in wartime London, encounter something terrifying in a forest. Later when they meet as grown women, they realise the experience has coloured their lives. A dark tale about the nature of stories themselves. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

The Thing in the Forest (Storycuts)

Deborah Moggach

Christmas should be a joyous occasion filled with peace and love, but the looming prospect of the festive season fills Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery with dread. Retired actor, thrice divorced, hapless father – Buffy is well versed in the complicated family Christmas, shuffling between exes and children. 
 
Except this year will be different. He has inherited a B&amp;B in rural Wales, and can finally escape the nearest and dearest, and play ‘Myne Host’ to a group of paper-hatted strangers, on escape-routes from their own clans. But when the strangers check in with their emotional baggage, and the Cab Sav begins to flow, Buffy soon realises that Christmas is never without its little complications… 
 
Join the gang at Heartbreak Hotel as they run riot, and celebrate Christmas the Buffy way.

Twin Beds

Christmas at Heartbreak Hotel

Irvine Welsh

In 'A Fault on the Line', a Hearts-Hibernian football match is on television, and a Sunday afternoon trip to a beer garden with the family is an unwelcome distraction for former trackman Malky. The day ends badly when he decides to hurry them home in time for kick-off. 
 
In 'Elspeth's Boyfriend', it's Christmas day in Leith, and Frank is suffering from the previous evening's excesses. He doesn't take kindly to his sister's fancy new boyfriend. Frank's grumblings about the choice of television programmes develop into a more serious confrontation when a spot of unwanted physical contact causes tempers to flare. 
 
In 'Kissing and Making Up', a drunk seeking an outlet for his frustrations heads to a strip club in the early afternoon. There, however, he only manages to make things worse. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these three stories were previously published in the collection Reheated Cabbage.

A Fault on the Line / Elspeth’s Boyfriend / Kissing and Making Up (Storycuts)

Rose Tremain

Salvatore, a young watchmaker from Italy, moves to London when the king of his hometown decrees that a period of twenty-six years is to be erased from history, never to be mentioned in public again. Since this constitutes the whole of period of his life Salvatore feels he has no choice but to flee. But in London, what challenges will this man face, who holds so deeply to the importance of time and identity? 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Evangelista's Fan.

Evangelista's Fan (Storycuts)

Louis de Bernières

John the gardener is disillusioned with his life, past and present. Alan is John's assistant, helplessly in love with Sylvie, the stable girl. These three characters are united by their friendship and by George, the barn spider. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Notwithstanding.

Talking to George (Storycuts)

It has been five years since Madeleine has recognised her husband James. As she drops deeper into her dementia, their lives fill up with the ghosts of her past and of Blitz-era London. When late one night his loneliness causes him to welcome a distressed young lady into their home, he must re-evaluate his perspective. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

The Pink Ribbon (Storycuts)

Susan Hill

In 'Need', Biddy longs to escape the noise and claustrophobia of the travelling circus she calls home, the chaotic family she shares her cramped quarters with, and the teasing, intimidating presence of Little Midge - the neighbour boy who spies on her. The lack of a plan and her attachment to the frail fortune-teller Rosa, is all that prevents Biddy from leaving. But when tragedy strikes, Biddy finds comfort in an unlikely figure. 
 
In 'Moving messages', Didi is afflicted by a curious condition: 'poetic tinnitus', which causes poetic snippets to ricochet around her mind at all moments. Despite this, she feels content with her lot, living in the country and making quilts to forge a living. She is happy - or is she? When Didi visits a glamorous old school companion in London, her self-doubt flares up, but she soon begins to see the cracks beneath the perfect veneer of her friend's life. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read.

Need / Moving Messages (Storycuts)

A homophobic Scottish labourer in London dies, and is condemned to confront his prejudices in the afterlife. A story about how tragedy can be casually courted when we ignore mental and physical cues, and turn our backs on the past. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection Reheated Cabbage.

Catholic Guilt (You Know You Love It) (Storycuts)

Alice Munro

Lorna finds herself strangely attracted to Lionel, a former maths prodigy and student of her husband's. When family affairs call him away and his absence coincides with the unwelcome visit of her cousin, she grows ill at ease. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Post and Beam (Storycuts)

Childhood friends, whose affectionate relationship suffered an abrupt disruption, are reunited unexpectedly in the home of a mutual acquaintance. Both bear the marks of life's disappointments as they set about renegotiating the terms of their association. When they choose to ignore a weather warning, the two are treated to one last adventure. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Nettles (Storycuts)

Donald Ray Pollock

In 'Holler', when his wife throws him out, Tom shacks up with the family of a casual girlfriend. They leave it to him to bathe, shave and keep a jug of wine within a straw's reach of their disabled patriarch. 
 
In 'I Start Over', retirement has not been living up to Big Bernie's expectations-not the expectations the television advertisements are peddling anyway. He treats himself to a souped-up 1959 Chevrolet, and this indulgence might just be what he needs to start over. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Holler / I Start Over (Storycuts)

Janice and Merrill, two widows, converse about their departed husbands over breakfast. Fond memories of their spouses are recounted, but it is in what they leave unsaid that they find the greater sustenance. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection The Lemon Table.

The Things You Know (Storycuts)

Mickey Baker, an ex-pat English bar owner living in Spain, returns to England to see his daughter and mother but must face the wrath of his ex-wife, a woman who pulls no punches. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection If You Liked School, You'll Love Work.

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work... (Storycuts)

Rachel Seiffert

In 'Blue', Kenny sets about furnishing and decorating his first flat. However, his giddiness does not last long. Even as his family and friends aid him in the feathering of his nest his worries mount higher and higher, and a young pregnant girl is always on his mind. 
 
In 'Tentsmuir Sands', a family outing to the Scottish seaside yields an early lesson in mortality for the youngest member. This honest and delicate tale presents an image of family life that is both sweet and ephemeral. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two stories were previously published in the collection Field Study.

Blue / Tentsmuir Sands (Storycuts)

Charlotte Grimshaw

Charlotte Grimshaw's collection of interlinked stories, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Medal for Fiction. She has described Opportunity as a single, unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters. 
 
Singularity, her powerful new collection, further develops the structure she explored in Opportunity. Characters from that book reappear, and new characters are added. The stories in Singularity cover a wide range of territory, from childhood innocence to adult desperation, from the depths of poverty to cushioned affluence, from London to Los Angeles, Ayers Rock to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each also contributes to a unifying narrative. Richly detailed, vivid with local colour, each story is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind the five principal characters together.

Singularity

Madeline, Eugene and Scott are three young, beautiful Americans, engaged in a love triangle and enjoying their free and drug-fuelled youth. When they have a car crash in the desert they are forced to wait for assistance. But events spin out of control when they are found instead by a young Mexican who, charged up on the memory of the violent death of his mother and the numerous indignities he has suffered at the hands of his American employers, is ready to make the world pay. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection If You Liked School, You'll Love Work.

Rattlesnakes (Storycuts)

Gordon Legge

NEAR NEIGHBOURS introduces an eccentric world very like our own, peopled by characters who live for football, music and sex but who are also monopedes, cross-gender doppelgangers, window-fetishists or sock-throwers. A master of broad farce and the paranoid monologue, Gordon Legge looks obliquely at life and returns it to us all with its grim hilarity, sadness and humanity restored. Gordon Legge's first collection of stories, IN BETWEEN TALKING ABOUT THE FOOTBALL, was hailed by the New York Times as a 'cult classic'. With this, his second, he joins the ranks of Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Duncan Mclean as one of the most exciting and original of the new Scots writers.

Near Neighbours

Ian McEwan

My Purple Scented Novel follows the perfect crime of literary betrayal, scrupulously wrought yet unscrupulously executed. 
 
 ‘You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade…You’d never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline… I don’t deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don’t intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages as a confession.’

My Purple Scented Novel

On a post-clubbing Sunday morning, a series of misfortunes aggravate Sarah's hangover. She must deal with last night's insistent and overly attentive partner, a run-in with an old lover and, most jarringly, the re-emergence of a painfully disabling toothache. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection Reheated Cabbage.

Victor Spoils (Storycuts)

Christopher's early declaration that he has known his parents all his life is shown to be misguided. Following the widowing of one of their associates, and the emergence of their latter day estrangement, he realises he must re-evaluate the history of his parents' relationship. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection The Lemon Table.

The Fruit Cage (Storycuts)

Andrew Porter

Andrew Porter's stories offer a stunningly astute vision of contemporary American suburbia, full of tension, heartbreak and emotional complexity - the work of an important new voice. 
 
These ten stories take us across the country - from rural Pennsylvania to suburban Connecticut - and deep into characters struggling to find meaning in their day-to-day lives. A childless couple, craving the affection of an exchange student, fail to set set the boundaries that would keep him safe. And in the title story, a college student looking for her soul mate confronts an impossible choice.

The Theory of Light and Matter

A young couple find their attempts to move to a new flat thwarted when their three year-old son rebels against the idea of leaving the only home he has ever known. It is as difficult to will a connection to dissolve as it is to force one into being. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection Field Study.

Dog-Leg Lane (Storycuts)

Raymond Wilson Butler, a director and writer down on his luck, is struggling to write a biography of his hero, the late filmmaker Halliday. He conducts a series of interviews with his widow Yolanda, an overweight woman living alone in the desert in Arizona with a penchant for taxidermy. Raymond knows she is an eccentric but nothing can prepare him for Yolanda's revelation of the true story of the life and death of her late husband. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection If You Liked School, You'll Love Work.

Miss Arizona (Storycuts)

Sylvia Winstanley, the youngest and most competent resident in a home for the elderly and self-labelled maverick, begins a written correspondence with the author of Flaubert's Parrot. We are treated to one half of the confused and hilarious dialogue between the two. Sylvia's bout of 'epistolomania' offers a charming perspective on growing old, and the associated difficulty of continuing to look forward rather than back. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection The Lemon Table.

Knowing French (Storycuts)

Joshua Furst

In Short People, we encounter, among many others, Jason and Billy, best friends who discover by the age of six how to conquer the world, only to see this idyll then shatter before them; Shawn, whose baptism compels him to make life a holy hell for everyone around him; and Evan, who finds that his pursuit of a Boy Scout merit badge is luring him into uncharted social territory. In the meantime, an agonized couple exhausts their expectations for their own kids, with an aftermath that afflicts them all. There's also Mary, whose sixteenth birthday precipitates an adulthood she is scarcely prepared to enter, and Emmy, who began that same transition when she was only twelve. Finally, and perhaps most harrowingly, is the nurse who with eerie prescience delivers so many babies to their destiny. 
 
In a remarkable display of imagination and compassion, Joshua Furst reconstrues our preconceptions about innocence, purity, faith and memory through an unflinching, pitch-perfect gaze, with both authority and originality. Each new story enhances a collection whose importance is thoroughly contemporary and at once hilarious and heartbreaking.

Short People

Damien, a gynaecological consultant and lapsed Catholic, replaces Christian icons with modern art; he worships the absence of God in the abstract staining of paint and ink. But when a vagrant young art student shows up in the ward, he once more has cause to question his personal and aesthetic convictions. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

Body Art (Storycuts)

McCreedy is forty-six and it's his birthday. His family are there to help him celebrate. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection The Darkness of Wallis Simpson.

How It Stacks Up (Storycuts)

When Jochen left his father behind in East Germany he carried his resentment with him. This lingering antipathy intrigues and confuses his American wife, Hannah. When a tentative reconciliation is broached and the family travel to Germany, she embarks upon a pilgrimage with the old man. The two wind up on a snowy corner in East Berlin where a final act of rebellion will be staged. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection Field Study.

Dimitroff (Storycuts)

Alice tacitly agrees with Kim's teachers when they hint that her daughter is not an easy child. A single mother of two, the bond with her second-born didn't present itself readily. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Field Study.

Reach (Storycuts)

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