A collection of stories written in duet.Eight highly original stories, each woven from the joint inspiration of two amazing writers.Sixteen celebrated authors respond, play, twist and develop their story in turn. Without the certainty of being in full control, Duets brings a new dimension to the drama of reading and writing.

Lieutenant Nowell Oxland, killed at Gallipoli in 1915 aged just 24, wrote poems and stories deeply rooted in place. He is unknown bar one poem Farewell, published anonymously in The Times nine days after his death. A native of Cumberland, he wrote it on the way to war, his heart longing for home:'There's a pool for which I'm grieving,Near the water-ouzel's home....And the curlews faintly crying,'Mid the wastes...

Featuring leading scientists acting as consultants on the stories, and writing scientific afterwords, bringing the theory featured in the stories to life, including Prof. Sarah Bridle (Jodrell Bank), Prof. Jonathan Wolff and Prof. Frank Jackson (the inventor of the 'Mary's Room' thought experiment).Science is always telling stories. Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative – just as much as metaphor – is a ke...

A merchant sailor works for a decade, captaining a yacht up and down the coasts of Malaysia, in the hope that his crooked employer will stay true to a promise...Years after a pandemic sweeps across Europe, wiping out its all-white population, a pilgrim returns to his Polish birthplace in search of the only other non-white kid he knew at school...An inscrutable hotelier loses his composure when a secret passage is discovered in his hotel, leading to a mysterious room and a p...

** LONGLISTED for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2018 **M. John Harrison is a cartographer of the liminal. His work sits at the boundaries between genres – horror and science fiction, fantasy and travel writing – just as his characters occupy the no man’s land between the spatial and the spiritual. Here, in his first collection of short fiction for over 15 years, we see the master of the New Wave present unsettling visions of contemporary urban Britain, as well as supernatural par...

**From the widely acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World and Tigerman, comes a virtuosic new novel set in a near-future, high-tech surveillance state, that is equal parts dark comedy, gripping detective story, and mind-bending philosophical puzzle."A Pynchonesque mega-novel that periodically calls to mind the films of Inception and The Matrix…. What a ride!" —The Washington Post**In the world of Gnomon, citizens are constantly o...

The inspiration behind the hit podcast THE 100 TYPES OF HUMAN with DEXTER DIAS and BBC 5 Live host NIHAL ARTHANAYAKE'This book is the one. Think Sapiens and triple it.' - Julia Hobsbawm, author of Fully Connected_______________________________We all have ten types of human in our head.They're the people we become when we face life's most difficult decisions. We want to believe there ...

"Hilary Mantel and Helen Simpson feature in the nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fifth year …"Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This new 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, magazine...

TV and movies will have you believing that black holes are huge holes in space and anything that falls into them is lost for all time – possibly falling into another universe or another time, or even falling forever.You may think that black holes run around in space like huge vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in their path. This is not true.But what actually is a black hole and what do they do? This book will help you find out.LearningIsland.com believes in the v...

The second collection of travel writing (and other essays) by Britain's funniest and most feared critic.A.A. Gill is probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertains readers of the Sunday Times with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews. Even those who want to hate him agree: A. A. Gill is hopelessly, painfully funny. He is one of a tiny band of must-read journalists and it is always...

Crafted around twenty-six extraordinary erotic encounters, this highly charged work is a powerful meditation on the pursuit of pleasure. In each chapter, titled after a letter of the alphabet, an anonymous narrator details his experiences, travelling to cruising grounds and sex clubs, exploring the boundaries of sex, desire, pleasure, and the body, while reflecting on the limits of language and the act of writing. In the tradition of Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker and Jean Genet, these piec...

An updated selection of Roger McGough's finest, best-loved verse. The complete span of McGough's writing, from the 1960s to the new millennium, is represented.'McGough's trademarks: the craft worn as lightly as the crown, the jokes that are something more, the underlying heartache, the acute sense of the way time slips away' Ian McMillan, Poetry Review 'McGough has done for poetry what champagne does for weddings' Time Out