In the beginning the page was blank and without form, and the scribe sat in front of it, a world forming inside his head. The world grew large, spilling out of him and on to the page. The scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagerö, and populated it with an assortment of likely and plausibly unlikely characters, and saw that it was good for his purposes. The people of Fagerö were often divided against each other but united in their appreciation of their happy little island. ...

This special story edition takes the words from Susan Duncan's bestselling A Life on Pittwater and offers a rare glimpse of a remarkable part of the world.Susan Duncan came to Pittwater when she impulsively bought a tumbledown, boxy little shack in Lovett Bay. The move changed her life forever, as she describes in her bestselling title, Salvation Creek. Now Susan lives in Tarangaua, the gracious house built for Dorothea Mackellar in 1925 and is a well lov...

In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another woman - will change his life forever. An early morning adventure out stealing horses leaves Trond bruised and puzzled by his friend Jon's sudden breakdown. The tragedy which lies behind this scene becomes the catalyst for the two boys' families gr...

“There is an illicit and vicarious pleasure in reading the details of another traveler’s follies, mistakes and near death experiences . . . Fascinating” (Good Reading Magazine).When A.J. Mackinnon quits his job in Australia, he knows only that he longs to travel to the well at the world’s end, a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth. Determined not to fly—he claims it would feel as though ...

Explore the wondrous sea and the oddities of human nature in this international bestselling, thrilling epic novel of a Danish port town.Hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, Denmark, whose inhabitants sailed the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. The novel tells of ships wrecked and blown up in wars, of places of terror and violence that continue to lure each...

The second novel in the Oslo Crime Files, a tense and dark quartet of thrillers for fans of Camilla Lackberg and Jo Nesbo.Psychologist Mailin Bjerke is due to appear on the notorious TV show Taboo, tackling its most sensational subject yet. But she never arrives at the studio.As the police struggle to find any sign of Mailin, her sister Liss, living on the edge in Amsterdam, takes matters into her own hands. Flying home to Oslo, she discovers a com...

'Fierce and sensuous.' Guardian'Exquisitely crafted.' Sunday Telegraph'Astonishing . . . A writer of rare vision and talent.' Sunday TimesFrom the speed and heat of summer London, to the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to an eerily still lake in the Finnish wilderness, Sarah Hall evokes landscapes with extraordinary precision and grace....

WINNER OF THE BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD 2017Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return. With its taut narrative and its wincingly visceral portrait of a man locked in an uneven stru...

One summer, writer and musician, Jasper Winn set himself an extraordinary task. He would kayak the whole way round Ireland -- a thousand miles -- camping on remote headlands and islands, carousing in bars and paddling clockwise until he got back where he started. But in the worst Irish summer in living memory the pleasures of idling among seals, fulmars and fishing boats soon gave way to heroic struggles through storm-tossed seas ... and lock-ins playing music in coastal pubs. Circling the...

From the No.1 bestselling author of The American Boy and The Ashes of London comes a collection of three gothic novellas – Broken Voices, The Leper House and The Scratch – perfect for fans of The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley.Three dark tales to read by the fireside in the cold winter monthsBROKEN VOICESIt’s Christmas before the Great War and two lonely schoolbo...

Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, drea...

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Sweden was an affluent, egalitarian country envied around the world. Refugees were welcomed, even misfit young Englishmen could find a place there. Andrew Brown spent part of his childhood in Sweden during the 1960s. In the 1970s he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill while helping to raise their small son. Fishing became his passion and his escape. In the mid-1980s his marriage and the country fell apart. The Prime Minister was assassinated. Th...