Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with ...

A woman named Naomi arrives at her sister's house, intending, it seems, to say goodbye. She is abandoning her city life for a remote Scottish retreat, which she will share with a man called Bernát, whom she considers some kind of visionary. In a sequence of stories filtered through multiple re-tellings, she illuminates the character of this elusive individual. One story seems of special significance: about Afonso, an Amazon boatman, who could be the last speaker of his mother tongue, a lan...

Daniel Brennan, approaching the premature end of his life, retreats to a room in his brother's suburban house. To divert himself and to entertain Ellen, his carer, he writes the journal that is Telescope, blurring truth, gossip and fiction in vignettes of his own life and the lives of those close to him. Above all he focuses on his siblings: mercurial Celia, whose life as a teacher in Italy seems to have run aground, and kindly Charlie, the entrepreneur of the family.Enric...

A stunning novel which examines our fears, prejudices and desires, from the author of Ghost MacIndoe and Invisible.On a beach in southern England, a dog returns to its owner with a human hand in its mouth. The hand belongs to a homeless eccentric named Henry, who has been wandering the south-west of England for the last thirty years. As the local policeman and his accomplice piece together Henry’s movements prior to his death, talking to those who knew and watched...

The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro, but in Castelluccio - as in the wider art world - he has his enemies, and his niece - just arrived from England - is no great admirer either. At the same time a local girl is missing, a disappearance that seems to implica...

Emaciated and barely recognizable, Ivo has died in hospital. Neither his mother nor his oldest friend, Nicholas, can fathom the malnourished state he was admitted in. In the house Ivo shared with a shifting group of men and women in need – people to whom he offered unconditional refuge – there are expressions of gratitude and professions of love, but no adequate explanation. His self-denial, they insist, was deliberate.In the aftermath of Ivo's death, Nicholas carefully reconstruct...

‘I often ask myself what makes a story work,’ wrote the greatAmerican author, Flannery O’Connor. ‘I have decided that it isprobably some action, some gesture of a character... which isboth totally right and totally unexpected... one that is both incharacter and beyond character.’The five stories shortlisted for this year’s BBC NationalShort Story Award with Book Trust all feature peoplemaking just such gestures, acting in ways that reach be...

In the small hours of January 1st, a man begins to write, having watched Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, a film in which a former lover - Imogen - plays a major role. For the next year, he writes something every day.His journal is a ritual of commemoration and an investigation of the character of Imogen and her relationships - with himself; with her family and friends; with other lovers.Imogen is an elusive subject, and The Great Concert of the Night is an in...

The lapping of the sea was a lesson in mortality...**' Live,' he heard, with each whisper of the water. 'Live; live; live.'Through Lucas Judd, the dead make contact with the living, or so he believes, or professes to believe. He is a man of such penetrating insight and empathy that many have faith in his gift. They confide in him, and find consolation. Even Joshua, his sceptical young neighbour, seems drawn by his compassionate sophistry. But when Erin, a much younger woma...

Originally the small plots where rural British workers grew the vegetables, herbs and flowers they needed, cottage gardens were romanticised and reimagined by nostalgic Victorian gardeners into a bucolic idyll.The style has endured ever since: drifts of colourful perennials mingle with fragrant roses, boisterous self-seeders teeter on the brink of chaos, fruit and vegetables scramble through rustic supports. Small in scale, wildlife friendly, natural and organic, 'old-fashioned' co...

'Bright, beautiful and achievable' – Mary Berry'A swoon-inducing, endlessly useful book' – The Garden'This fusion of sheer joy and hard data is a powerful combination, a formula so convincing on every level that it makes any gardener want to carve out space for a cutting garden' – The New York TimesTips, tricks and everything you cou...

Jonathan Buckley’s ‘Ghost MacIndoe’ is a bold and ambitious novel that focuses on the life of Alexander MacIndoe, a self-centred man who is characterised only by his physical beauty and a complete lack of will.Jonathan Buckley’s third novel opens with Alexander MacIndoe’s earliest memory: a February morning in 1944, in the aftermath of the second wave of German air-raids. Set mainly in London and Brighton, Ghost MacIndoe is the story of the next fifty-four years of Alexander’s life...