Have you ever……ached for something you couldn’t name?…imagined a different life and wondered ‘what if’?…dreamed of a place you’ve never been, but knew would be home?…yearned for a truth, a way of being?Fourteen authors from six countries, spanning five continents, take the reader into their experience of hiraeth, the longing for something more, lost, imagined, or just out of reach. Homelands left behind, childhoods relived, journeys not taken, long-l...

Sawubona, a Zulu greeting, 'I see you and welcome your presence.' A beautiful sentiment, the embodiment of paying attention, 'I notice you. I am with you. You are not invisible.' Inside this book are stories by writers who have done exactly that.They have opened their eyes and hearts to people, places, objects, joys, griefs and small acts of survival. Embraced what is broken, funny, tender, nearly invisible.No heroes in capes. No grand speeches. Just human beings on a share...

Sawubona, a Zulu greeting, ‘I see you and welcome your presence.' A beautiful sentiment, the embodiment of paying attention, ‘I notice you. I am with you. You are not invisible.’ Inside this book are stories by writers who have done exactly that.They have opened their eyes and hearts to people, places, objects, joys, griefs and small acts of survival. Embraced what is broken, funny, tender, nearly invisible.No heroes in capes. No grand speeches. Just human beings on a share...

An unforgettable, unnerving short story about a writer’s life from one of today’s greatest writers – extracted from her upcoming collection, THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER.“One summer at the fag-end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I’d agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you thin...

Inspired 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 thirteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2023 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2022 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.This new anthology contains stories by Alinah Azadeh, Davi...

Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. Over the Moon is her fifth book from Bloodaxe. These are poe...

What kind of Detective am I? Eardrum or tympanum? Gullet or oesophagus? Pussy or pudenda? A Detective needs a language almost as much as a language needs a Detective. In this new collection of stories, award-winning author Ivan Vladislavic invites readers to do some detective work of their own. Each story can be read as just that - a story - or you can dig a little deeper. Take a closer look, examine the artefact from all angles, and consider the clues and patterns concealed within. Whethe...

Hugo Williams is rightly cherished for his inimitable fusion of autobiography and irony, and a technical glide that allows his writing to 'slip back to the past as effortlessly as a dreamer' ( The Times).I Knew the Bride is Williams' eleventh collection of poems, and his first since West End Final was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes for poetry in 2009. This new volume bears - and lays bare - those qualities that have become so char...

A delightful short story from Jane Gardam, revisting that Titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Edward Feathers (known to many as Old Filth) in the days after he loses his beloved wife, Betty.

** 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...

For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. 'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age', as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways.In the words of Andrew Marr, A.. A. Gill was 'a golden writer'. Th...

Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can't escape his anger. As the world - and men in particular - continue to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal. A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of deep empathy even when that also means...