Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

The bookshelves of American literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From this continent their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is Emma Vane.

In these more welcome days of equality between the sexes we usually forget that the often cited ‘Gentler Sex’ can have dark and disturbing trains of thought that are more than the equal of their male brethren. Indeed, they can manipulate words in a matter of lines from comforting and loving to dark, foreboding and utterly terrifying. These femme fatales really do create stories that leech vile characters into dark and disturbing quite horrific narratives.

Science has brought us many benefits for our health, our understanding, and our quality of life in all sorts of positive ways. We are all the better for it. But there is also a darker side when science reaches into the shadows. It claims that a fuller knowledge would benefit everyone, it must investigate. But, let’s be honest, some in science have lost their true calling and their ideas and notions come from these darker impulses. Their thoughts become muddled, their path more for themselv...

In this series we turn the pages of classic short stories to put together the literary building blocks of how a particular genre or theme began, how it built its foundations to become the well-loved and well-worn genre that it is today.Do authors have the same ideas at more or less the same time? Or can they sniff out an opportunity as to which way the tastes of an audience are moving.Success undoubtedly builds success and in literary terms we can more politely say that imi...

An author’s talents may seem obvious and indisputable as they move words and ideas into gathered phrases and stories.But where do these ideas and stories come from? A lonely thought that suddenly gathers form? An inspiration from a Muse? A suggestion from an everyday event?Perhaps in the case of their darker, more malevolent stories, other forces are at work. They help to nourish single words into sentences and paragraphs that ease themselves from the shadows and are sudden...

**Friendship is found far from home. Set in the years before WW2 and travelling from London to the island of Guernsey, The Guernsey Girls is the first in a touching series from Mary Wood, author of The Jam Factory Girls.'Wood is a born storyteller' – Lancashire Evening PostJanuary 1936.** After the hard work of being a maid at Wallington Manor in the lead-up to Christmas, Annie is thrilled at the prospect of going home to Bethnal Green. She has mi...

**The final heartbreaking instalment of The Guernsey Girls wartime trilogy by Mary Wood, bestselling author of The Orphanage Girls series.Their dreams are worth fighting for . . .**Winter, 1941. Olivia’s life in Guernsey is uprooted by the Nazi occupation. Forced to flee in the dead of night, she escapes to London’s East End. As she steps foot in Bethnal Green, Olivia’s former life is there to greet her, and she’s ordered to spy for the British. To find her...

When the body of a young man washes ashore in Stockholm's southern archipelago, Manfred Olsson is called in to investigate. But with his daughter, Nadja, in a coma, it is with some reluctance that he leaves his wife alone by their child's bedside.Elsewhere, eighteen-year-old Samuel lives with his hard-working single mother, Pernilla. His charm has always been able to get him out of trouble, but when he finds himself in the middle of a drug deal gone wrong, he is forced to make a ru...

**From Mary Wood, bestselling author of The Jam Factory Girls, comes the second heartfelt installment in The Guernsey Girls trilogy.War separates them, but it cannot dampen their spirits . . .Spring, 1940.** Annie’s new husband Ricky leaves to fight, but she soon discovers battles brewing closer to home. As her sister Janey begins to unravel, only Annie can pick up the pieces – and, with London’s police officers on the front line, she must also step up at work and ...