From the subsistence farms of nineteen fifties Ireland to the hedonistic life of Left Bank Paris, from the bleak beauty of the West of Ireland to Pragues post communist rudderless freedom, from life on swinging Sohos unforgiving streets to the excitement of the stag hunt in County Meath, from the life and death struggle of the skyscraper construction workers of New York City to the longings of a lovelorn Dublin office worker, from the Sisters of Mercy slave labour laundries to the virginit...

One man. One bike. A whole lotta trouble. MEET SLIM. He bought his first motorcycle, a Bridgestone 175 cc, at age sixteen in 1968. Since then, he's been in and out of trouble (mainly in) and experienced the thrills and perils of riding on the highway. He's been a guest inside some of Australia's toughest jails where he learned a lifetime's worth of human behaviour and handy life skills, such as how not to do an armed hold-up. Never one to shy from a punch or retreat from a fight, Slim is a...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARDSAcutely observed, evocative collection of short stories from the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of Unexploded, blending fiction, biography and memoirHovering on the border of life and death, these stories form a ground-shifting collection, taking us into history, literature and the hidden lives of iconic figures.In 1920s Nova Scotia, as winter begins to thaw, a woman emerges fro...

A bumper collection of yarns from motorcyclist enthusiasts around Australia.Get out on the highway and into this new collection of all-Australian motorcycle stories - the latest addition to ABC Books' bestselling Great Australian series. Edited by John Bryant and full of laconic Aussie humour, the collection features 40 stories that capture the freedom, fun, independence and adventure that comes with having a bike - no matter how big or small. Meet tex and his blue heeler Bundy who ...

122 fantastic stories from Britain's best crime writersFor ten years the Mammoth Best British Crime series has been publishing an annual volume of the most outstanding crime and mystery short fiction published in the UK. Over 400 stories by the very best writers in the field have been published. Contributors have included, among many others, Mark Billingham, Liza Cody, Roger Jon Ellory, Reginald Hill, Peter James, Simon Kernick, Alexander McCall Smith, Val McDermid...

The U.S. debut of leading U.K. author David Szalay, named one of The Daily Telegraph's twenty best British novelists under fortyJames is a man with a checkered past—sporadic entrepreneur, one-time film producer, almost a dot-com millionaire—now alone in a flat in Bloomsbury, running a shady horse-racing-tips operation. Katherine is a manager at a luxury hotel, a job she'd intended to leave years ago, and is separated from her husband. The novel unfolds in ...

Something Special, Something Rare presents outstanding short fiction by Australia’s finest female writers. These are tales of love, secrets, doubt and torment, the everyday and the extraordinary.A sleepy town is gripped by delusory grief after the movie being filmed there wraps and leaves. A lingering heartbreak is replayed on Facebook. An ordinary family walks a shaky line between hopelessness and redemption.Brilliant, shocking and profound, these tales will leave...

This remarkable memoir begins with Don Walker's early life in rural Australia and goes up to the late ’80s. In mesmerising prose, Walker evokes childhood and youth, wild times in the ’70s, life on the road and in Kings Cross, music-making and much more. Shots is a stunningly original book, a set of word pictures – shots – that conjure up the lowlife and backroads of Australia.‘Singular, strong and beguiling’ —The Sydney Morning Herald‘Better than good. Mos...

THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF FLESHA brilliant novel about money and love and betting everything on a single throwJames and Katherine meet at a wedding in London in 2006, towards the end of the money-for-nothing years. James is a man with a varied past now living alone in a flat in Bloomsbury; Katherine is separated from her husband and working in an interim job in a luxury hotel.They exchange phone numbers at the...

This award-winning story collection summons all the laughter, darkness and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity - and a stiff drink.These stories, filled with a grand sense of life's absurdity, form a remarkably surefooted collection that reads li...

One of M. John Harrison's most acclaimed novels in a career of near universal acclaim, CLIMBERS is, perhaps, the least fantastical of his novels. Yet it carries life-changing moments, descriptions of landscape bordering on the hallucinogenic and flights of pure fictive power that leave any notion of the divide between realistic and unrealistic fiction far behind. First published in 1989, CLIMBERS has remained a strong favourite with fans and reviewers alike.A young man seeks to get...

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...