Two women live alone but side by side. One day they meet over a jar of buttons and an awkward friendship begins …An intimate show with a wonderful balance of light and dark, humour and contemplation, plus fantastic live music and songs.

In 1979, I was three months pregnant with my second child and in excruciating pain, pain I’d been dealingwith every day for almost 15 months. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t sleep. In just a year, I’dgone from being an active young woman to being almost entirely incapacitated. Everything was pain.Trying to find the cause was almost as bad as the diagnosis. At every turn, I was told nothing was wrong.Nobody was helping.Another three mont...

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...

**A horror short story from #1 bestseller, Paul Finch. Part of the Dark Winter Tales series: unputdownable reads for cold winter nights…**In 1975, 11-year-old Andrew Conroy was brutally murdered, his body hidden under a bush in a dense woodland area known as The Dell.The detective who headed the investigation, now in his late sixties, has felt guilty ever since that he was unable to solve the murder case.Each year he asks his son to drive him to The Dell so he can w...

Featuring:Sarah Hall, Lucy Wood, Lisa Blower, Lavinia Greenlaw and Lionel Shriver.Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read ’in one sitting’. ‘Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect,’ he argued, once the effect has been established, of course.The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2013 all use brevity with striking results, whether presenting a comp...

Two of Garry Disher’s seminal collections of fiction, collected together for the first time. If you love Garry’s literary fiction or crime fiction, his longer or shorter works—this collection has it all, and usually all at once.Flamingo Gate · Melbourne in the last decade of the millennium feels like a hard-boiled fiction or a noir film, with corruption in the air and on the ground. Six short stories and a novella circle the city's decay, spiral towards a thrilling...

Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume. Neither genre nor Granta shall be overlooked in the search for th...

Exploring grief, yet neither bleak nor overwrought, this powerful short story won the 2013 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition. The judge, Carl Nixon, commended its 'seemingly effortless artistry' and its skilful and well-sustained handling of demanding narrative techniques: 'the author does not miss a beat', he said. Cleverly juxtaposing the past and present, the narrator draws the reader into her life. The judge concluded: 'Beautifully controlled use of simile and ...

A collection of short stories and poems with a twist

These outstanding stories from the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize will provoke, stimulate, move, amuse, unsettle, and entertain

All the best stories are but one story in reality−the story of escape. It is the only thing whichinterests us all and at all times, how to escape.A.C. BensonEscapist literature is traditionally the domain of well-loved genres. In Escape,we aim to disturb expectations, and to delight. Turn the page and here isexperimentation, here fantasy. Here’s crime, existentialism and romance. Nowan escape artist, now an escapee...

Teach your children important lessons about alliteration, rhyme and rhythm in this exciting treasury of childrens verse. Containing 26 original rhymes one for each letter of the alphabet this beautifully illustrated book takes young children on a poetic adventure through Letterland.