The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its twelfth year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed 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 site...

How do you write a novel?Practising novelists and teachers of creative writing reveal their working methods and offer practical advice. Subjects covered range from magic realism to characterisation, surrealism to historical fiction, via perspective, plot twists and avoiding being boring, among many others.This book is forcreative writing studentswriters and readers of novelsteachers of creative writingWith co...

'Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.' —Mark WatsonAn anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you'll hear something worse … In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane ...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE KITSCHIES‘The Way Inn’ takes the polished surfaces of modern life, the branded coffee and the free wifi, and twists them into a nightmare.The Way Inn is a global chain of identikit mid-budget hotels, and Neil Double is a valued member of its loyalty scheme. Neil is a professional conference-goer, a man who will attend trade fairs, expos and conventions so you don't have to. This life of anonymised, budget travel wou...

‘Wiles is basically Kafka, if Kafka had spent more time in British hotels and pubs’ David Baddiel Will Wiles both re-invents and murders the London novel, in a spectacular act of evil, surgical intensity’ Warren Ellis ‘It’s outstanding’ Mail on Sunday, Event MagazineThe dark, doomy humour of Care of Wooden Floors mixed with the fantastical, anarchic sense of possibility of The Way Inn, brought together in a fast moving story set in contemporary Lo...

A bold and brilliant debut from a darkly funny new voice.Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for a piece called Variations on Tram Timetables. He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city.But this book isn't really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. He has entrusted an old university friend with the task of looking after his cat...

A taster of some of the brightest and best new novels from the rising stars of fiction.From a time-bending love story to an Irish political drama, from a big American book about talent on the pitch to a hedonistic coming-of-age tale, there is something in here to suit all readers of really good novels. Championed by bestselling authors such as Hilary Mantel, Tash Aw and Patrick Gale, this collection is proudly bought to you by Fourth Estate.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE KITSCHIES‘The Way Inn’ takes the polished surfaces of modern life, the branded coffee and the free wifi, and twists them into a nightmare.The Way Inn is a global chain of identikit mid-budget hotels, and Neil Double is a valued member of its loyalty scheme. Neil is a professional conference-goer, a man who will attend trade fairs, expos and conventions so you don't have to. This life of anonymised, budget travel wou...

‘Wiles is basically Kafka, if Kafka had spent more time in British hotels and pubs’ David Baddiel Will Wiles both re-invents and murders the London novel, in a spectacular act of evil, surgical intensity’ Warren Ellis ‘It’s outstanding’ Mail on Sunday, Event MagazineThe dark, doomy humour of Care of Wooden Floors mixed with the fantastical, anarchic sense of possibility of The Way Inn, brought together in a fast moving story set in contemporary Lo...

Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. Following the residents of Pepys Road, Capital features a cast of characters that you will be sad to leave behind.

Brought to you by Penguin.A generation after the events of The Long Earth, mankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by Stepping. Where Joshua and Lobsang once pioneered, now fleets of airships link the stepwise Americas with trade and culture. Mankind is shaping the Long Earth – but in turn the Long Earth is shaping mankind ... A new ‘America’, called Valhalla, is emerging more than a million steps from Datum Earth, with core American values rest...

Author of the National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier. His birth ended his mother's life in Tennessee. Scrawny and wiry, he runs away at the age of 14. As he makes his way westward, the impoverished and illiterate youth finds trouble at every tur...