A young family receives a welcome surprise when old Uncle Ian dies and leaves them a cottage in north Wales. For Ian's nephew and his wife Ann, it seems a stroke of incredible good fortune, enabling them to leave their unfulfilling lives in the city for a newfound freedom in the remote seaside cottage. There's just one catch. Uncle Ian's will has a strange condition: the couple must care for his pet cormorant or forfeit the bequest. They think nothing of it at first: Uncle Ian was eccentri...

'A thorough reinvention of the Gothic landscape . . . Gregory's voice and vision are wholly original.' - Ramsey Campbell'Admirable . . . a queerly intense, hothouse atmosphere.' - Newsday'A finely written and truly creepy novel with a haunting feel for decay and corruption.' - BooksAndrew Pinkney is a young English solicitor's clerk with boyish good looks and a gentle manner. But he also has a dark side. When his girlfriend Jennifer laughs at his impotence, he lashe...

'[An] artful first novel, reminiscent of the tales of Poe . . . Gregory uses a low-key style and subtle lyricism to build an atmosphere of nightmarish horror in a tale that could become a classic.' - Publishers Weekly'[A] first-class terror story with a relentless focus that would have made Edgar Allan Poe proud.' - New York Times'[N]o summary can do justice to the subtlety of Gregory's first novel, with its fresh, vivid, sensual prose and its superb descriptive and evocati...

Over the past four decades, few writers have created a body of work as distinctive – or disturbing – as Stephen Gregory’s. In his tales of death and madness the menace usually comes not from the supernatural, but from the natural, and particularly birds, which in Gregory’s fiction often bring terror on their dark wings.Included in this volume are the ghost stories ‘The Late Mr Lewis’ and ‘The Boys Who Wouldn’t Wake Up’ as well as the macabre ‘The Cormorant’, which provided the insp...

It's David Kewish's eighteenth birthday. But the day doesn't turn out quite as he expected. After suffering a gruesome injury, he receives a strange present in the form of a baby black-backed gull. But David's accident isn't the only misfortune to coincide with the bird's arrival. Soon a whole series of violent incidents, and even deaths, begins to unfold in the seaside town where he lives. And when people notice how close David is to the gull, they begin to suspect he is to blame for the ...

After a bruising experience as a teacher in Africa, Harry Clewe has come to the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales for some peace and quiet. One day, he stops to pick up an attractive blonde hitchhiker . . . and his life will never be the same again.A desperate and wild obsession ends in a tragedy that condemns Harry to a solitary existence, a loneliness that bears its own depraved and bitter fruit. In the years that follow, his life is changed by a bizarre and ultimately dangerous su...

Female-led European literature with a focus on place in nonfiction, narrative voice in fiction and visual panache. World exclusive for illustrations and letters by Margiad Evans/Peggy Whistler, UK exclusive for selection of Lizzie Le Blond's skating photography, prose by award winning authors Rachel Hewitt and Jay Griffiths, winter ghost story by Hollywood writer Stephen Gregory.

Answering an ad for a job as live-in tutor to a teenage boy, Christopher Beal arrives at the big, old house deep in the woods with no idea what he's getting into. His pupil is Lawrence Lundy, an odd boy who practices strange rituals by moonlight and is haunted - perhaps literally - by the spirit of his dead father. For mysterious reasons, his mother, Juliet, keeps him at home, isolated from the world. During the suffocating heat of a long summer, Christopher finds himself entangled in the ...

Oliver Gooch comes across a tooth in a velvet box, with a note from 1888 saying it belonged to a young Edgar Allan Poe. When he converts an old church to a bookshop selling strange and occult titles, he displays the tooth there, calling the store Poe's Tooth Books.But the bookstore has been bought with blood money: Oliver and his wife Rosie received a large cash settlement when their young daughter Chloe was left brain-damaged after a hit-and-run accident. Rosie hopes the child wil...

Mia is a mischievous mouse who loves to play pranks on her friends. One morning, after scaring herself with an extraordinarily loud yawn Mia decides that she will trick her animal friends with her scary boo scream but when her plans dont turn out the way she expected Mia has to turn to her friends for help. You cant scare me, Mia Mouse is a story of friendship, kindness and sharing. A heart-warming story for the whole family to enjoy.

Frederick Douglass's dramatic autobiographical account of his early life as a slave in America.Born into a life of bondage, Frederick Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write. It was a crime punishable by death, but it resulted in one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever recorded. His gripping narrative takes us into the fields, cabins, and manors of pre–Civil War plantations in the South and reveals the daily terrors he suffered.Writt...

The sweeping long-lost novella, now available in paperback for the first time in 40 years, alongside recently rediscovered short story 'The Lost One', from the original queen of romantic suspense'Total heaven' Harriet EvansLanzarote. A wealthy young woman elopes with an impoverished fisherman, leaving her family distraught.Perdita West, secretary to a famou...