Up in the Air meets Inception in this smart, innovative, genre-synthesizing novel from the acclaimed author of Care of Wooden Floors—hailed as " Fawlty Towers crossed with Freud," by the Daily Telegraph—that takes the polished surfaces of modern life, the branded coffee, and the free wifi, and twists them into a surrealistic nightmare of infinite proportions.Neil Double is a "conference surrogate," hired by his clients t...

The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its twelfth year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed 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, newspapers and web site...

How do you write a novel?Practising novelists and teachers of creative writing reveal their working methods and offer practical advice. Subjects covered range from magic realism to characterisation, surrealism to historical fiction, via perspective, plot twists and avoiding being boring, among many others.This book is forcreative writing studentswriters and readers of novelsteachers of creative writingWith co...

'Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.' —Mark WatsonAn anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you'll hear something worse … In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane ...

Neil Double is a 'conference surrogate,' hired by his clients to attend industry conferences so that they don't have to. It's a life of budget travel, cheap suits, and out-of-town exhibition centers. But his latest job, at a conference of conference organizers, will radically transform him and everything he believes as it unexpectedly draws him into a bizarre and speculative mystery. In a brand new Way Inn - a global chain of identikit mid-budget motels - he meets a woman he has seen befor...

A witty debut novel about a house-sitting gig gone terribly, hilariously wrong.A British copywriter stays for a week at his composer friend Oskar's elegant, ultramodern apartment in a glum Eastern European city. The instructions are simple: feed the cats, don't touch the piano, and make sure nothing harms the priceless wooden floors. Content for the first time in ages, he accidentally spills some wine. Over the course of a week, both the apartment and the narrator'...

“An eye-opening dazzler” (Stephen King) about a pair of globetrotting, gore-obsessed investigative journalists whose entanglement in a French philosopher’s death becomes a surreal journey into global conspiracy from legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg.Stylish and camera-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan thrive on the yellow journalism of the social media age. Naomi finds herself drawn to the headlines surrounding a famous couple, Célestine and Aristide, Marxist philosoph...

Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, has faced many horrors during his career, but in this tale he tells of an early encounter with something that horrified even him.Pantomime.A provincial theatre has seen a series of strange deaths. The young Cabal investigates, even though this requires him to don red tights, a curling moustache, and become... the Demon King.Back in 2006, "Exeunt Demon King" was the second Johannes Cabal story published. It has lon...

A groundbreaking collection of stories, including four never-before-published tales, from the award-winning author of Perdido Street StationWhat William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Among the fourteen superb fictions in Looking for Jake, including one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon, ar...

** 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...

From Willingdon to Lyttelton, a memoir about love, learning and the journey to thirtyJoe Bennett is the author of countless columns, over twenty books, and now, at long last, a memoir. From There to Here describes a childhood of fishing, cricket, friends, a dog, some mild molestation and a few deaths. There's the long-haired gloom and vehemence of adolescence. There's love and heartache, an urge to write and a fruitless struggle against teaching for a living. Superbly written, of c...

'All I had ever wanted was privacy. In order to get it, it seemed that an exceptionally detailed 500,000-word book was in order...'He was born into an ancient powerful dynasty and, through no fault of his own, became one of the most recognisable men on the planet.His life was a constant barrage of press intrusion and manipulation. Until finally, he demanded that it stop. In order to get the privacy he so craved, he has written a frostbite-and-all b...