Showing titles in Anthologies & Short Stories

Jack Roberts is back from the Sudan and with a crippling wound, no longer an active soldier. When he is sent to Iran to help find oil for British battleships he has to leave home once more. This time he leaves a son who is about to embark on a military career too. The Roberts family is soon going to war again.

On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.

Here are two complete audiobooks by Denis Johnson, narrated by Will Patton. Listen to both Train Dreams, and Jesus’ Son, as well as an excerpt from Denis Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke.

A blind man spends his days roaming the beaches of Kenya collecting shells, classifying them by feeling their whorls, spines and folds in his fingers. A young woman discovers that she can explore the inner world of an animal's mind by touching its freshly dead body. A refugee from Liberia, who cannot escape the horrors that he has witnessed, finds salvation in the clandestine act of burying the hearts of beached whales.

Brought to you by Penguin. The air glitters with hope as the snowy village of Merrywake celebrates the Christmas season after the tumult of the Napoleonic Wars. As the Viscount’s famous Twelfth Night Ball draws closer, many of the villagers have a story to tell – we meet a lovelorn vicar and...

Winter 218 BC: In Cisalpine Gaul, a Carthaginian patrol is moving stealthily through thick woodland. It’s led by Hanno, one of Hannibal’s young officers, and his second-in-command, Mutt. Famished and cold, they are making for a town full of the grain that they desperately need. But the local Gauls cannot be trusted; and although defeated, the Romans still have patrols in the area. With peril on every side and a deadly ambush ahead, there is no certainty that either Hanno or Mutt will survive....

There is a troubled town nestled on the border of Shropshire and Powys. Steeped in folklore, domain of ghosts, it is witch haunted Wendlelow. Pity those who dwell there. Here is a collection of interconnected tales, ghostly, gothic and monstrous, so curl up by the fire, dim the lights, and prepare to be horrified.

Uniquely disturbing and deeply erotic, this collection confirms Sarah Hall as one of the greatest writers of her generation. From the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to the speed and heat of summer London, to an eerily still lake in the Finnish wilderness, Sarah Hall evokes landscapes with extraordinary precision and grace.

From Sunday Times best-selling author Ben Kane comes a collection of short stories.

Heartbroken and alone, Lucy Patterson retreats to a crumbling Victorian house in Otley for Christmas. Behind the dusty shelves of its library she finds the impossible, a hidden passage that leads not to another room, but to December 1885.

Singer's famous and never-before-recorded novel about a passionate, forbidden love affair between Jew and Gentile in 17th century Poland.

Her path to the throne is paved with treason.... 1330. Philippa of Hainault may be married to King Edward III, but she’s penniless and powerless. England quivers in the clutches of the Dowager Queen Isabella and her darkly ambitious lover Lord Mortimer while her husband rots in jail, a prisoner at Mortimer’s hand. It will take a courageous young man to emerge from the shadows and rise up against this formidable pair. Philippa won’t sit back and see Edward puppeteered. She is determined to see justice done.

Andrea Levy, author of the Man Booker shortlisted novel THE LONG SONG and the prize-winning, million-copy bestseller SMALL ISLAND, draws together a remarkable collection of short stories from across her writing career, which began twenty years ago with the publication of her first novel, the...

In this haunting short story of loyalty and betrayal, a young woman in early 1900s Massachusetts discovers that in navigating her treacherous coming-of-age, she must find her voice first. For fatefully observant Adeline, growing up carries an ominous warning from her adulterous mother: don’t say a word. Adeline vows to never speak again. But that’s not her only secret. After her mother takes a housekeeping job at a lighthouse off the tip of Cape Ann, a local woman vanishes. The key to the mystery lies with Adeline, the silent witness.

Here is a collection of joined-up stories for these disjointed times, for the exiled and the out-of-place. Letters from love poets and blood-stained dictators, memos from corrupt businessmen and out-of-touch courtiers. The action stretches from Chislehurst to the Chagos Islands, from bathos to Billericay.

A genealogy test sparks a woman’s reflection on the two accounts of her life--the real one and the one she’s always told the world--in this poignant short story by Cheryl Strayed, the bestselling author of Wild. In 1964, teenage Geraldine Waters was sent away by her parents to an unwed mothers’ home, where she gave up her newborn for adoption. Ever since, she’s lived an alternative narrative. Decades later, it’s time for Geraldine to reconcile the telling of her life, to finally grieve, and to discover what happened to that part of her past that slipped away.

Alive with anecdote, this is a further wonderful companion for anyone who enjoys Scotland's heritage and tales of its gaunt and shadowy ruins.

Jennet Preston was an ordinary woman with an extraordinary death. Pursued and vilified by her young lord and master, Thomas Lister, she was accused and tried - twice - for murder by witchcraft in 1612. This is the story of her second trial. A friend of the Device family of Malkin Tower, Jennet Preston’s story starts and ends in Yorkshire, yet is inextricably entwined with the most famous witch trial in British history - that of the Pendle Witches.

For debt-ridden Deana Herwood, losing a hand of cards to the wealthy Lord Rockwell was bad enough. To settler her loss, she must offer her body to him for one night of pleasure. When she expresses her reservations, he offers an even more outrageous proposition. Can she win the wager or will her body succumb to the wicked attentions of Lord Rockwell?

"Sventurata è la terra che ha bisogno di eroi", scriveva Bertolt Brecht, ma è difficile credere che avesse ragione se poi le storie degli eroi sono le prime che sentiamo da bambini, le sole che studiamo da ragazzi e le uniche che ci ispirano da adulti. La figura del campione solitario è esaltante, ma non appartiene alla nostra norma: è l'eccezione. La vita quotidiana è fatta invece di imprese mirabili compiute da persone del tutto comuni che hanno saputo mettersi insieme e fidarsi le une delle altre.