A woman with a successful career in child protection is floored by her husband's sudden death; a retired civil servant smothers his wife, but can't go through with their pact; a teacher fleeing a disastrous school trip finds himself – literally – in a dark wood.Pascal famously said we shall die alone. But there are always others left behind to grieve, to cheer, to feel guilt, relief or laughter, because we are human, whether we like it or not. In these stories, a d...

Denis Klamm, feckless scion of two former Leaders, returns to the Island for his father's funeral, only to find it sinking. Or the sea rising – it depends what you believe. Either way, they're all going to drown – unless the young, idealistic and newly-elected Leader, Jessica King, really is the saviour long foretold by Our Island Story.But Jessica is only Leader because Ari Spencer, the special advisor's special advisor, has made it so. She wants solutions; Ari offers schemes. She...

Guy Ware's new novel charts a course from the 1930s onwards through the fragmentary memories of the 85 year-old Charlie, whose identical twin brother JJ has recently died. Sons of a working-class Communist family, growing up in the radical Peckham Experiment and orphaned by the Blitz, the twins emerge from the war keen to build the New Jerusalem.In 1968, JJ's ideals are rocked by the fatal collapse of a tower block his council and Charlie's development company have built. When the ...

This is what a bad day looks like: a day when something happens.Robert Exley works for the Faculty: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. In counter-terrorism, that's your job.His wife worked there, too. She's been dead for years, but somehow she's never far away. Now their bookish son is leaving home. He writes an encrypted journal Exley feels obliged to decode, to read the things they cannot talk about.When Exley takes on a col...

Holly Stanton's grandfather was a spy. In Berlin in September 1939; in Norway when the Germans invaded. Sailed back to Orkney by a brave Norwegian, whose family was killed in retaliation. And he kept a diary.Holly has always known that. It's the family story. But when her father finally passes on a transcript of the diary, she finds the 'brave Norwegian' has a name. He is real. But why was a spy writing a diary at all?Part war-time thriller, part exploration of the ethics o...

'Fleshing out the shadowy metaphysical hints of Beckett's novels, this intellectual romp is the best debut I have read in years' Nicholas Lezard, The GuardianMonday lunchtime: a bank is being robbed. The gunmen tell everyone to get down on the floor, but an old man refuses. Behind him in the queue is Rada Kalenkova, an investigator for the Office of Assessment, recording everything she sees. Shots are fired and a woman is killed. Or maybe two. But Rada ignores the murders ...

The third in a series of annual anthologies, The Best British Short Stories 2013 reprints the cream of short fiction, by British writers, first published in 2012. These stories appeared in magazines from the Edinburgh Review to Granta, in anthologies from various publishers, and in authors' own short story collections. They appeared online at 3:AM Magazine, Fleeting and elsewhere.This new anthology includes stories by: Charles Boyle, Reg...

Featuring...Charlotte Allan, Juliet Bates, Annie Clarkson, Adam Connors, Steve Dearden, Paul de Havilland, Tyler Keevil, Chris Killen, Richard Knight , Jacqueline McCarrick, Neil McQuillian, Heather Richardson, David Rose, Guy Russell, and Guy Ware.…Organ-playing wunderkinds, poets on government re-employment schemes, unlikely celebrity party guests…While these stories take in a vast array of subjects and styles, they share a common attribute: they d...

'There is no more carefully chosen yet eclectic anthology series in existence in Britain today' – Susan Haigh, The Short ReviewBest 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, magazines, ne...

Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survi...

Winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2016A comic masterpiece about love, art, greed and the banking crisis, by the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Bee Sting‘Hugely entertainingly [and] read-the-whole-page-again funny . . . The best novel I have reviewed this side of the Atlantic’ ObserverMeet Claude: an investment-bank drone longing for something more meaningful. Marooned in soggy Dublin, ...

In each of these tales master storyteller Richard Ford is drawn to the themes of intimacy, love, and their failures. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound; an exacting career woman celebrates Christmas with her adamantly post-nuclear family; a couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardour that has disappeared, both gradually and suddenly, from their lives; on a spring evening's drive, a young wife confesses to her husband the affair she had wit...