A killer stalks the streets of Leeds, a city in England's industrial north. Every man is a suspect. Every woman is at risk. But in a house on Cleopatra Street, women are fighting back.It's the eve of the 1980s. Police officer Liz Seeley joins the squad investigating the murders. With a violent boyfriend at home and male chauvinist pigs at work, she is drawn to a feminist collective led by the militant and uncompromising Rowena. There she meets Charmaine—young, Blac...

I made what may be called a rash and foolish marriage to a man I scarcely knew.1904: Cathie longs for adventure. A whirlwind romance with soldier and artist Herbert Jackson offers this and more, but Herbert is violently jealous and she is soon fighting for her freedom – and her life. A fictionalised account of Catherine Carswell's first marriage, What We Did in the Dark is a compelling portrait of a trail-blazing writer.

A killer stalks the streets of Leeds, a city in England's industrial north. Every man is a suspect. Every woman is at risk. But in a house on Cleopatra Street, women are fighting back.It's the eve of the 1980s. Police officer Liz Seeley joins the squad investigating the murders. With a violent boyfriend at home and male chauvinist pigs at work, she is drawn to a feminist collective led by the militant and uncompromising Rowena. There she meets Charmaine—young, Blac...

The day after her wedding, Donella Ferguson Watson wakes up shackled to a man haunted by the past. The lonely days become weeks, months. Her husband Hugh, a prison doctor, will offer no explanation for their sexless marriage. She comes to suspect the answer lies with a hunger-striking suffragette who was force fed and held in solitary confinement. But what really happened between Hugh and his prisoner patient?

'Tender and elegant' Guardian'Unlike anything else in modern English literature' D.J. Taylor, SpectatorA damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an...

'Pure delight' The TimesThroughout her career, prize-winning novelist Jane Gardam has been writing glorious short stories, each one hallmarked with all the originality, poignancy, wry comedy and narrative brilliance of her longer fiction.Passion and longing, metamorphosis and enchantment are Gardam's themes, and like a magician she plucks them from the quietest of corners: from Wimbledon gardens and cold churches, from London buses...

A novice Scotland Yard detective chases his nemesis through the London underworld in this “extravagant and thoroughly enjoyable” historical mystery debut set in Victorian England (The Scotsman).Before Sherlock Holmes, there was Campbell Lawless . . .London, 1859. Great exhibitions. Foreign conquests. Underground trains. The era of Victorian marvels is also the time of the Great Stink. Beneath the respectab...

The Light of Evening is a reissued edition of the novel by award-winning author Edna O'Brien.In Edna O'Brien's twentieth work of fiction, an elderly widow on her deathbed in rural Ireland tells the story of her life—a story of love, family, estrangement, and motherhood."O'Brien brings together the earthy and delicately poetic: she has the sound of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." — Newsweek

One morning before dawn in the stables of her country estate, Lady Truelove meets a violent death in an encounter with a dangerous horse. Classified as “death by misadventure,” this appears a gruesome accident. But Scotland Yard Detective Joe Sandilands suspects foul play—a misgiving he is struggling to separate from his personal grievances toward Sir James Truelove, who is Lady Truelove’s widower and the influential academic patron of Dorcas Joliffe, whom Joe one day hopes to marry.

The real motive wasn't love and it wasn't greed . . . It rose to the surface out of a grey pit of boredom. When Charlie Pritchard is shown a way to escape his mundane and monotonous life as a small-town bank clerk in a tiny Welsh resort in the 1920s, and live instead in wealth with beautiful Delphine, he knows that this is his only chance. And he has to take it - even if the plan is to rob his own bank. However, as zero hour approaches he realises that there is far more at stake than he ha...

TELEGRAPH, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015Hilarious, exuberant, subtle, tender, brutal, spectacular, and above all unexpected: these two extraordinary volumes contain the limitless possibilities of the British short story.This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including som...

In this unique collection of short stories composed between 1910-62, Evelyn Waugh's early juvenilia are brought together with later pieces, some of which became the inspirations for his novels. 'Mr Loveday's Little Outing' is a blackly comic tale of a mental asylum and its favourite resident; 'Cruise' sees a hilarious series of letters from a naïve young woman as she travels with her family; 'A House of Gentlefolks' observes a group of elderly eccentric aristocrats and their young heir; an...