When Alexander receives a cryptic letter inviting him to attend an unspecified course of instruction, he feels somehow compelled to go. From that moment on, his world will change, and all of his former certainties will be called into question. When he arrives at the institution in the small provincial town, no one is able - or willing - to tell him anything about the course, and life there seems slightly out of focus and eerily ambiguous. As Alexander struggles to understand the strange si...

A political prisoner, A., has just been released from a long term of imprisonment for writing a seditious book. Fearing re-arrest, he leaves town, setting off on foot along a disused railway track running over a huge viaduct that looms over the city. As his journey progresses through a surreal and nightmarish landscape, he passes through strange towns and villages and meets other travelers following the same path for reasons of their own, with his pursuers always at his heels. A. does not ...

Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes's Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2023 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2022 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.This new anthology contains stories by Alinah Azadeh, Davi...

First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices.Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink through these desperate years, the narrator charts his encounters with women and fellow artists, as he seeks to glimpse a wonder in life barely discernible beneath the ...

In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia.But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows ...

One man wants to publish, so another must perish, in this darkly witty philosophical novel by "a spectacularly gifted comic writer" ( Newsweek ).The Third Policeman follows a narrator who is obsessed with the work of a scientist and philosopher named de Selby (who believes that Earth is not round but sausage-shaped)—and has finally completed what he believes is the definitive text on the subject. But, broke and de...

**“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review"Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine**Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively s...

THE classic thriller of the 20th century - 'Simply the best escape and pursuit story yet written' [THE TIMES] - with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane'[A] masterpiece: a bestseller that redefined its genre' GUARDIAN' Rogue Male is probably the most famous chase thriller ever, influencing an entire generation from Frederick Forsyth to Lee Child' CATHOLIC HERALD

Ignored on her birthday, Bunty Felse celebrates by herself—and finds herself in mortal danger. From the award-winning author of the Cadfael Chronicles.Edgar Award and CWA Diamond Dagger Award–Winning AuthorOn the eve of her forty-first birthday, Bunty Felse is overcome with depression. The weather is dreary; her only child, Dominic, fails to call with birthday greetings; and her husband, George, arrives home only to announce that he has to ...

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. S. T. Joshi has stated that "his work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's." Though Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. A Haunted Island A Case of Eavesdropping ...

Tuesday nights have suddenly turned quite ridiculously noisy in the country town of Chalmsbury, where the good folk are outraged at having their rest disturbed.It begins with a drinking fountain being blown to smithereens - next the statue of a local worthy loses his head, and the following week a giant glass eye is exploded. Despite the soft-soled sleuthing of cub reporter Len Leaper, the crime spate grows alarming.Sheer vandalism is bad enough, but when a...

Few works of contemporary literature are so universally acclaimed as central to our understanding of the human experience as Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy.Molloy, the first of these masterpieces, appeared in French in 1951. It was followed seven months later by Malone Dies and two years later by The Unnamable. All three have been rendered into English by the author.The first novel of Samuel Beckett’s mordant a...