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...

In Hard Light, Michael Crummey retells and reinvents his father's stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago. Speaking through generations of storytellers, he conjures a world of hard toil and heavy weather, shot through with stoicism, grim humour, endurance, and love. This is writing that is supple and charged with intensity, language that vivifies --- electrifies --- whoever and whatever it describes. "Michael Crummey's lucid, dexterous writing shies a...

On the path to self-destruction after the death of his girlfriend, things take a turn for the worse, when child pornography is found on Varg Veum's computer and he must battle to prove his innocence … the chilling new instalment in the award-winning Varg Veum series, by one of the fathers of Nordic Noir.'Mature and captivating' Rosemary Goring, Herald Scotland'Moving, uncompromising' Publishers Weekly...

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....

It is 1989 and all over Europe Communism is crumbling. Arvid Jansen is in the throes of a divorce. At the same time, his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life, while everything around him is changing at staggering speed. As he attempts to negotiate the present, he remembers holidays on the beach with his brothers, his early working life devoted to Communist ideals, courtship, and his relationship w...

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...

A family story of epic scale, b****y the author of NORWEGIAN WOOD and THE BELL IN THE LAKE."An intricate story about war, family, secrets and,yes, wood ... An engaging, satisfying read" The Times"So cleverly plotted, and it builds up such effortless dramatic momentum as it zeroes in on its conclusion" *Scotsman***Edvard grows up on a remote mountain farmstead in Norway with his taciturn gra...

Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home.In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain's south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time throug...

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...