Selena and Julie are sisters. As children they were closest companions, but as they grow towards maturity, a rift develops between them. There are greater rifts, however. Julie goes missing at the age of seventeen. It will be twenty years before Selena sees her again. When Julie reappears, she tells Selena an incredible story about how she has spent time on another planet. Selena has an impossible choice to make: does she dismiss her sister as a damaged person, the victim of delusions, or ...

Rachel's boyfriend Frank is different from other people. His strangeness is part of what she loves about him: his innocence, his intelligence, his passionate immersion in the music of JS Bach. As a coder, Frank sees patterns in everything, but as his theories slide further towards the irrational, Rachel becomes increasingly concerned for his wellbeing. There are people Frank knows online, people who share his view of the world and who insist he has a unique role to play. In spite of Rachel...

Named as one of '50 Writers You Should Read Now' by The Guardian. A beautifully inventive short-story collection from award-winning author Nina Allan.A collection of short stories from the award-winning author of The Rift and The Dollmaker, Nina Allan. This compilation brings together rarely seen tales spanning the vast breadth of Allan's writing career for the first time. It also includes a brand-new introduction and one never-before-published st...

A child is kidnapped with consequences that extend across worlds… A writer reaches into the past to discover the truth about a possible murder… Far away a young woman prepares for her mysterious future…The Race weaves together story threads and realities to take us on a gripping and spellbinding journey.

WINNER OF THE CWA HISTORICAL FICTION DAGGER 2026A Granite Silence is an exploration - a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father.Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here ...

Named as one of '50 Writers You Should Read Now' by The Guardian. From the award-winning author of The Rift, Nina Allan, The Silver Wind is a remarkable narrative exploring the nature of time itself. A powerful tale of time travel, time lost, time regained and time disrupted. In this remarkable narrative, watches and clocks become time machines, vehicles to explore alternate realities, the unreliability of memory and roads not taken. Martin and Dora Newland – sometimes siblings, sometimes ...

Cath is a photographer hoping to go freelance, working in a record shop to pay the rent and eking out her time with her manager Steve. He thinks her photography is detective work, drawing attention to things that would otherwise pass unseen and maybe he's right . . .Starting work on her new project - photographing murder houses - she returns to the island where she grew up for the first time since she left for Glasgow when she was just eighteen. The Isle of Bute is...

"The Art of Space Travel" by Nina Allan is a science fiction novelette. In 2047, a first manned mission to Mars ended in tragedy. Thirty years later, a second expedition is preparing to launch. As housekeeper of the hotel where two of the astronauts will give their final press statements, Emily finds the mission intruding upon her thoughts more and more. Emily's mother, Moolie, has a message to give her, but Moolie's memories are fading. As the astronauts' visit draws closer, the unearthin...

EWA CHAPLIN WASN'T AFRAID TO MAKE DOLLS THAT WEREN'T COMFORTING. SHE SEEMED TO KNOW THAT DOLLS ARE PEOPLE, JUST LIKE US.THE BEWITCHING NEW NOVEL FROM THE AWARD-WINNING GUARDIAN FRESH VOICES AUTHOR'A fantastic book' Andrew O'Hagan'Wholly original - worthy of a modern Grimm' Andrew Caldecott, author of Rotherweird'A masterful and multi-layered haunted toysh...

SPIN won the 2014 British Science Fiction Association Award. Nina Allan is acclaimed as a short fiction author and 'Spin' brings you an opportunity to try her longer fiction. 'Spin' is a novella which weaves Greek mythology, science fiction and alternate history into Layla Vargas'. journey across an alternate modern Greece.In the myth Arachne was the awesomely skilled weaver whose tapestries challenged the gods and eventually resulted in her being transformed into a spider. In Nina'...

Willy Randle is a sensitive young man from a close, loving family. With a place at university and a new girlfriend, he’s happy and confident, his future secure – until a minor accident leaves him with altered perceptions, and his world is shattered.Willy begins to doubt his own senses, convinced that the world and the people around him are not what they seem. Determined to discover the truth about what has happened to him, he sets out on a quest that leads him ever...

Ruby tells the story of Ruby Castle told in snapshots and fleeting glimpses and secret histories, in tales repeated and reinvented by those who fall under the horror film actress's spell: her childhood sweetheart, an antiquarian bookseller with a passion for magical artifacts, the mistress of the poet who was once Castle's lover, a young girl in a future Russia who dreams of the stars. Worlds collide, and the boundaries between the real and the fantastic begin to break down.