In Your Face = Trigger WarningsThis book contains twenty-two original and reprinted speculative fiction stories dealing with provocative themes. These stories are confronting, but with a firm purpose. They will make you uncomfortable, because they are a bit too hard-hitting or close to the bone. But they will also challenge you, by interrogating these themes and ideas to make a point about the world we live in.CONTENTSAlan Baxter / Bodies of EvidenceAngela Sla...

What Endures is a story of powerful love. It is a story that will break your heart. Inspired by true events, it tells of the incredible bond between a mother and daughter, and with gut-wrenching poignancy reminds us of the little things that make life worth living.“Holdstock’s writing manages to be both heartbreakingly poetic and densely detailed … sad passages, ghostlike recollections, written almost from the vantage point of the present, establish the book as a great wor...

On the night that Carla Reid plans on celebrating her wedding anniversary with her husband Kevin and their grown son Jack, their New Zealand farmstead has never felt more like home. But when Ben Toroa and another aspiring gang member brutally force their way into the house with robbery and more on their minds the night and the rest of both their lives take a radically different direction. As Carla struggles to come to terms with the aftermath and bereavement of different kinds, and Ben fac...

“Isn’t enough that I can’t stop thinking about you Sophie?” he says, his voice low and persuasive. “What else do you want from me?”Sophie chose to be alone rather than be with David Preston, the man who has her heart, and yet refuses to share his. Now she's trying to make a life for herself, a life that will not include him.But how can she get over a man who refuses to let her go, especially when he can still set fire to her blood with just one tou...

"Who are you?"After three months of travelling, all Connor Preston wants to do is sink into his own bed. The last thing he expects is to find a stark-naked woman already there….Josie Marchpane wasn't anticipating company either. Connor may be six feet four inches of pure muscle and boast a disturbingly sexy smile, but a fortnight in the South of France is the one thing standing between Josie and her sanity-and she's not about to give it up without ...

Perfect for readers of George Saunders, Jennifer Egan and Heather O'Neill, a rich and inventive collection of exquisite short stories by a major newcomer to Canadian literature.In this deeply felt, compulsive and edgy work, Sarah Meehan Sirk shines a distinctive light on love and death in their many incarnations, pushing against the limits of the absurd while exposing piercing emotional truths about what it means to be gloriously, maddeningly alive.In "The D...

From the internationally acclaimed, Booker-shortlisted author of Dirt Music and The Riders comes a mesmerizing collection of overlapping stories set in small-town Western Australia. These searing and evocative stories examine the frailty of ordinary people and illuminate the turnings in life—the sudden detours, awkward awakenings and mid-life regrets—where each character must face the realization that the past always lives on in the present. This portrait of a starkly bea...

Unlucky thieves invade a house where Home Alone seems like a playground romp. An antique bookseller and a mob enforcer join forces to retrieve the Atlas of Hell. Postapocalyptic survivors cannot decide which is worse: demon women haunting the skies or maddened extremists patrolling the earth.In this chilling twenty-first-century companion to the cult classic Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, Ellen Datlow again proves herself the most masterful editor of the ...

A collection of short stories and poems with a twist

Anthology of short stories from around the world

A collection of short stories and poems with a twist

The first Bath Short Story Award was launched in 2012. By the time the competition ended in March 2013 there were almost 1,200 entries from all over the world, varying in content and perspective. Themes included war, love, relationship struggles, bereavement, neglect, abuse and the curious things people do.The stories here are linked by a common theme - the choices people make or that others have made for them. A young woman makes a life-changing decision over the course of a lunch...