Three journeys. Three thousand years. One destination. The Devil’s Highway is a thrilling, epic and timely tale of love, loss, fanaticism, heroism and sacrifice.‘Brilliant … a powerful meditation on the damages – and the good – we have wrought, and will wreak, on the living world’ Robert Macfarlane, Book of the YearHis fingers fastened about Her stone. He brought it to the light and held it to his nose. There was lightning lock...

Presented here in a new translation and featuring the author's own watercolour illustrations, The Little Prince has become a classic philosophical fable for young and old, as well as a global publishing phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide and being translated into dozens of languages.Alma Junior Classics series of illustrated classics includes some of the greatest books ever written for younger readers and new translations of unjustly neglected international wo...

The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth yearInspired 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 fourteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2023 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.

The characters on Norminton's purgatorial 'Ship of Fools' - a ship that's going nowhere fast - bicker and struggle for attention; telling tales that bounce off one another to form a compendium of interralated stories, running from lyrical romance to scabrous satire, by way of fairy-tale and black comedy. Often wickedly funny, always stunningly written and displaying an astonishing range of voices (the prudish nun, the bawdy old woman, the penitent drunkard, and the glutton whose stomach do...

Known for both its industrial roots and arboreal abundance, Sheffield has always been a city of two halves.From its botanical gardens and elegant parks, to the brutalist high-rise estates of Park Hill, and the hinterland nightclubs of ‘Centertainment’, it is a city caught between the forges of the past and the melting pot of the present.Bringing together new short stories from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Sheffield traces the contours of this comp...

A simple act of gallantry in the Malaysian jungle spawns a lifelong feud in the Home Counties...A fading actor with a terminal illness devises a meticulous plan to leave the stage in style...A pregnant composer contemplates motherhood at the end of civilisation...Spanning centuries and continents, the stories in this collection amount to a tour de force of literary worldbuilding. From deeply insecure time travellers to medieval mystics and futuristic body modificati...

The Lost Art of Losing is a collection of aphorisms by award-winning novelist Gregory Norminton. By turns comic and despairing, jubilant and wry, they present, through fragments, a picture of the mind — and of troubling times. Gregory Norminton transforms the aphorism into something more accessible and personal. Ultimately he uses aphorisms to question everything — including the aphorism itself: "Incessantly we ask the meaning of life to protect us from hearing the perfectly obvious answer...

An incredible collection of stories for our shared planet from the likes of Joanne Harris, Toby Litt and Liz JensenA riveting and provocative collection of short fiction, Beacons throws down the gauntlet to award-winning writers, challenging them to devise original responses to the climate crisis. From Joanne Harris’ cautionary tale of a world where ‘outside’ has become a thing of the past, to Nick Hayes’ graphic depiction of the primeval bond between man ...

Thumbnails is a collection of short stories or “micrograms” in which Gregory Norminton once again experiments with form, using his stylish and witty prose to examine the nooks and crannies of our distracted lives. Witty and thought-provoking, the stories are brief but clear sketches very different people and places in very different times. Taken as a whole, the collection is an exercise in storytelling, proving that narrative can be found in the most unlikely packages. Sexual love flourish...

ARTS AND WONDERS spans a glorious canvas, peopled by werewolves, thieves, emperors, travelling players and a forger dwarf who takes a lifetime to learn the danger of illusions.Tomasso Grilli, a dwarf gifted with an extraordinary capacity for artistic forgery (and flexible morals) recounts the story of his life, from his base beginnings in Florence, through his apprenticeship to the painter Arcimboldo, to his life of crime in Prague and subsequent banishment, to the gilded fame he f...

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best. Perhaps intended as a companion to his final, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pecuchet, this compilation was the result of a lifetime of collecting the absurd and the cliched with darkly humorous explanations. A playful look at nineteenth-century values and talking points, this dictionary will provide enduring entertainment and prove relevant e...

This intimate and compelling historical novel deftly interweaves three periods in the life of 17th-century painter Nathaniel Deller: in 1650, just after Charles I's execution, the young Deller joins a political group too radical even for the Roundheads; ten years later, on the night of Charles II's return from exile, Deller is accused by his former friend Thomas Digby of betraying their ideals; and in 1680, the increasingly blind painter commissions his former pupil William Stroud to finis...