"Everything leaves marks, even water…" Two children watching their parents argue inside a greenhouse, an armoured boy and his troubled sister, a human statue who's lost the ability to move and a floating six year old tethered to the backyard fence: the characters in Jan Carson's debut story collection are all falling apart in their own peculiar way. Absurdist, allegorical and disturbingly convincing, these characters are both wrongdoers and victims of another's wrongdoing. They are people ...

I don’t recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets.There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other.So begins Reggie Chamberlain-King’s introduction to The Black Dreams, a thrilling and compelling collection of specially commissioned stories that explore the emotional geography of growing up and living in Northern Ireland.The fourteen stories gathered here criss-cross coast, bor...

Each day of 2015 Jan Carson wrote a short story on the back of a postcard and mailed it to a friend. Each of these tiny stories was inspired by an event, an overheard conversation, a piece of art or just a fleeting glance of something worth thinking about further. In this collection of highlights, Carson presents a panoramic view of contemporary Belfast – its streets, coffee shops, museums and airports – through a series of small but perfectly formed snapshots of her home.

Eleven-year-old Malcolm Orange has grown up in the backseat of an ancient Volvo station wagon, crisscrossing America with a diminishing collection of grandparents, one good-for-nothing father, an increasingly absent mother, and an unfortunately ordinary brother. Their journey ends abruptly in a pay-by-the-week motel in Portland, Oregon when his father finally abandons the family. Impoverished and alone, the remaining Oranges find themselves living in Chalet 13 of the Baptist Retirement Vil...

New fiction by:Suad AldarraCaleb Azumah NelsonJan CarsonElaine FeeneyOona FrawleySinéad GleesonAnna Jean HughesCaleb KlacesNaomi KrügerHenrietta McKerveyPaul McVeighMary Morrissy

From a “deeply talented” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning writer comes an alternate history of Northern Ireland’s recent past where the last remaining residents of a haunted archipelago face imminent eviction from their home.In 1958, a politician’s ludicrous proposal to create a seventh county for Northern Ireland by draining Lough Neagh—the largest lake in Ireland—was, quite understandably, never implemented. In Few and...

In 2015, suffering from a dreadful case of writer's block, novelist and short story writer Jan Carson set herself the challenge of spending an entire year writing short pieces of microfiction on postcards and mailing these to friends around the world. When 2016 ended, she found it impossible to stop writing postcard stories. The stories in this collection represent the best of some five hundred postcard stories Jan has written since.

A young woman’s birthday party is disturbed by the vision of a homeless man sleeping under an arrangement of mocking fruit...A late-night text conversation goes awry when a forwarded link to a live feed of gathering walruses doesn’t have its intended effect...A woman hopes a pending announcement to her in-laws will finally give her husband the attention he craves...The stories shortlisted for the 2020 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University demonstr...

A surreal and darkly comic collection of stories that offer a fresh and irreverent look at life in contemporary Northern Ireland from “one of the most exciting and original Northern Irish writers of her generation” (The Sunday Times, London).Humorous and horrifying, tender and absurd, the stories in Quickly, While They Still Have Horses offer a fresh, irreverent look at life in post-conflict Northern Ireland. From first loves to strained relations...

From a “deeply talented” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning writer comes an alternate history of Northern Ireland’s recent past where the last remaining residents of a haunted archipelago face imminent eviction from their home.In 1958, a politician’s ludicrous proposal to create a seventh county for Northern Ireland by draining Lough Neagh—the largest lake in Ireland—was, quite understandably, never implemented. In Few and...

Dramatised readings from the award-winning Jan Carson, plus bonus interview with the author herselfNorthern Irish writer Jan Carson won the EU Prize for Literature 2019 for her novel The Fire Starters, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. Her work has been translated into over 15 languages and appeared in numerous journals and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Contained within this collection are a sele...

A surreal and darkly comic collection of stories that offer a fresh and irreverent look at life in contemporary Northern Ireland from “one of the most exciting and original Northern Irish writers of her generation” (The Sunday Times, London).Humorous and horrifying, tender and absurd, the stories in Quickly, While They Still Have Horses offer a fresh, irreverent look at life in post-conflict Northern Ireland. From first loves to strained relations...