The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its eighth year.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 ...

Lucy Swann is trying on a new life. She's bought new clothes and cut and dyed her hair. But in a small town in northern France her flight is violently cut short. When Inspector Vivier and his handsome assistant Sabine Pelat begin their investigation into her murder, the chance encounters of her last days take on a new significance. Lucy's death, like a stone thrown in a pool, sends out far-reaching ripples, altering the lives of people who never knew her, and the lives of her loved ones ba...

It's the 1970s, and a mysterious woman has a cache of letters which claim to tell the story of the death of Fanny Imlay, half-sister of Mary Shelley and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Did Fanny really commit suicide in an inn in Swansea in 1816, as historians thought? The letters instead suggest a faked death and an escape from Fanny's fraught family life. It could have been an independence of which Fanny's mother would have been proud. But the letters also suggest the re-born Fanny rema...

European female-led literature with emphasis on writing of place, particularly Wales. Creative nonfiction, literary essays, fiction, poetry and photography.

A disquieting everyday world of make-believe as roles and performances are explored in Jo Mazelis' darkly gothic new collection, Ritual, 1969. What might a little girl be made of? Sugar and spice? And when she grows up? A dressmaker, teacher, flower-maker, actress? Or should she run away to the circus? From the playground to adulthood the path is beset with misunderstandings and missed dates, traps for the unwary and disingenuous dissembling. Not all is what it seems in a world where first...

Bohenna is a small Cornish village, dominated by a thriving vineyard and the Pennyman family who run it. It’s an insular community, all gossip and rumour and intertwined lives. Claire knows everyone; she grew up there. She even married into the Pennyman family.Every summer tourists swarm over the vineyard and village. So when Claire’s young daughter disappears without trace, it’s obvious to everyone that a visitor took her. Who else would do such a thing?Six years later, he...

It's 1965 in a tight-knit working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, and Ruth Malone -- a single mother who works long hours as a cocktail waitress -- wakes to discover her two small children, Frankie Jr. and Cindy, have gone missing. Later that day, Cindy's body is found in a derelict lot a half mile from her home, strangled. Ten days later, Frankie Jr.'s decomposing body is found. Immediately, all fingers point to Ruth.As police investigate the murders, the detritus of Ruth'...

What lengths would you go to protect the ones you love?When the complex web of dark family secrets begins to gradually unravel, Tim and his sister Rose are consumed by trying to protect their 46-year-old secret, a secret that was never meant to be told.Faced with an impossible dilemma, they must decide whether to tell the truth or face the consequences.One thing's for sure, nothing remains buried forever... A gripping, highly emotive story of love, ...

New-World China meets Old-World Italy, as Ava investigates the dark side of the glamourous world of fashion in the latest installment of the Ava Lee Novels.Ava attends London Fashion Week for the launch of the PÖ fashion line, one of the major investments she and her partners in the Three Sisters — May Ling Wong and Amanda Yee — have made over the past year. The show is a success, but perhaps too much of one. It attracts the attention of Dominic Ventola, the princi...

The International SensationIt begins in a Stockholm city park where the abused body of a young boy is discovered. Detective Superintendent Jeanette Kihlberg heads the investigation, battling an apathetic prosecutor and a bureaucratic police force unwilling to devote resources to solving the murder of an immigrant child. But with the discovery of the mutilated corpses of two more children, it becomes clear that a serial killer is at large.Superintendent Kihl...

An NPR Best Book of the YearThe author of the wildly popular The Kind Worth Killing returns with an electrifying and downright Hitchcockian psychological thriller—as tantalizing as the cinema classics Rear Window and Wait Until Dark—involving a young woman caught in a vise of voyeurism, betrayal, manipulation, and murder.The danger isn’t all in your head . . .Growing up, Kate Priddy was always a b...

In this white-knuckle thriller for fans of Lisa Gardner and Karin Slaughter, a brilliant, troubled forensic psychologist finds herself matching wits with a frighteningly talented sociopath.Dr. Iris Ballard’s glory days are behind her, so when Luke Hudson, her former FBI partner and onetime lover, asks for help constructing a psychological profile of an elusive serial killer who murders single mothers and dumps their bodies in the woods, Iris turns him away. She jus...