82ASK

A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Mary Lavin

Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight. 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TÓIBÍN 
 
Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen. 
 
Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin’s work is largely unpublished and overlooked. This collection re-establishes her as one of the most genius, irresistible and memorable voices of the last century. 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TOÍBÍN 
 
‘She is, to come right out with it, magnificent’ New York Times 
 
‘Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other’ Sunday Times 
 
‘Lavin writes like a dream’ New York Times Book Review

An Arrow in Flight

Angela Carter

Discover Angela Carter's classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales woven in seductive, luminous storytelling. 
 
Beauty is turned into a Beast, Little Red Riding’s grandmother is stoned to death as a witch and, in the title story, a beautiful young pianist is swept into the world of a rich and sinister aristocrat, a man whose previous three wives have all died in mysterious circumstances. 
 
From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. 
 
'Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality' Ian McEwan 
 
'A quirky, original, and baroque stylist' Margaret Atwood 
 
With an introduction from award-winning short story writer Helen Simpson

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

A special edition of the feminist cult classic

Intan Paramaditha

Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors.

In this dazzling debut story collection from celebrated Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, fairytale, taboo, lust and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix. 
 
A black velvet butterfly darts out of a cave. Menstrual blood pools in the backseat of a car. Rats pour forth from an open doorway. 
 
These stories set in the Indonesian everyday – in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns – reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Melding horror and myth, this is subversive feminist fiction at its finest, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave. 
 
The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

Apple and Knife

Yoko Ogawa

Three strange, tortuous stories from the shadow queen of contemporary Japanese fiction. 
 
A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. 
 
A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather than a story of growth the diary reveals a more sinister tale of greed and repulsion. 
 
Driven by nostalgia, a woman visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. There she finds an isolated world shadowed by decay, haunted by absent students and the unsettling figure of the looming caretaker. 
 
The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

The Diving Pool

Julio Cortázar

A collection of masterful short stories in Julio Cortazar's sophistocated, powerful and gripping style. 
 
'Julio Cortázar is truly a sorcerer and the best of him is here, in these hilariously fraught and almost eerily affecting stories' Kevin Barry 
 
A grieving family home becomes the site of a terrifying invasion. A frustrated love triangle, brought together by a plundered Aztec idol, spills over into brutality. A lodger’s inability to stop vomiting bunny rabbits inspires a personal confession. 
 
As dream melds into reality, and reality melts into nightmare, one constant remains throughout these thirty-five stories: the singular brilliance of Julio Cortazar’s imagination. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY KEVIN BARRY 
 
‘Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed’ Pablo Neruda

Bestiary

The Selected Stories of Julio Cortázar

Graham Greene

Graham Greene, known for his iconic novels, also wrote extraordinary short stories. Here some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li. 
 
Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. 
 
Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before. 
 
‘No twentieth-century writer had a subtler mind for human comparison’ Zadie Smith 
 
‘Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature’ John le Carré 
 
'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A superb storyteller’ New York Times 
 
‘One of the finest writers of any language’ Washington Post 
 
‘One of our greatest authors’ Independent 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LI

Duel Duet

Selected Stories

Arthur Conan Doyle

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of some of the very best, most mysterious and most satisfying Sherlock Holmes stories with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
Discover Sherlock Holmes's most memorable and intriguing cases, including adventures with mysterious masked strangers, ingenious heists, murderous plots and hidden jewels. From Holmes's lodgings at 221B Baker Street, the famous detective and his faithful sidekick Dr Watson unravel the shadiest crimes taking place on the streets of London and across the English countryside. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Thomas Mann

With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. 
 
Ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach is on holiday in Venice when he first notices a fellow guest in the foyer of his hotel: an exceptionally beautiful boy who is staying there with his family. Admiration gives way to obsession as his days begin to revolve around seeing the boy. Meanwhile, ominous signs point to a disease spreading through the magnificent, but decaying, city and, blinded by his fixation, Aschenbach fails to notice. 
 
Death in Venice is the finale of this seven-story collection, marked by masterful storytelling and profound, often haunting, insight.

Death in Venice And Other Stories

Robert Louis Stevenson

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's dark, suspenseful work of genius about the good and bad within us all, complete with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
Dr Jekyll has been experimenting with his identity. He has developed a drug which separates the two sides of his nature and allows him occasionally to abandon himself to his most corrupt inclinations as the monstrous Mr Hyde. But gradually he begins to find that the journey back to goodness becomes more and more difficult, and the risk that Mr Hyde will break free entirely from Dr Jekyll's control puts all of London in grave peril. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories

Edgar Allan Poe

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Poe's most macabre and irresistible stories with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
Edgar Allan Poe's stories uncover the deeply unnerving strangeness lurking within us all. His genius for horror and suspense went on to influence the world, from Freud to Hollywood. This complete collection of his best short stories contains the well-known works 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart' alongside a wide range of delightfully terrifying tales to unsettle and enthrall. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories

Kenji Miyazawa

Japanese fairy tales - enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings and the great natural world. 
 
Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa's stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories such as 'The Ungrateful Rat' where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets - until he meets the Rat Trap. There are morality tales such as 'The Restaurant of Many Orders', where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa's best-known 'Night Train to the Stars', where a magical steam train carries children through the night and up to the heavens. 
 
These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan's most beloved early twentieth-century writers. 
 
WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID MITCHELL AND AN INTRODUCTION BY KAORI NAGAI 
 
'Kenji Miyazawa fables are international-class' David Mitchell 
 
'For readers who relish the disturbing material of fairy tale, the specificity and surprise of tanka, collisions of the everyday with the supernatural and glimpses of Japan right on the brink of industrialization, Kenji Miyazawa's masterly stories will be a delight' New York Times 
 
'Few works have given me so much pleasure (and hard work) as the tales of Miyazawa Kenji [...] more genuine originality, and a more universal appeal, than almost anything else I have done.' John Bester, translator

Night Train to the Stars

beloved, enigmatic Japanese folk tales

Roberto Bolaño

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRIS POWER 
 
‘A master of the short form’ Independent 
 
Wide-ranging, suggestive, and ever-daring, Roberto Bolaño's short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels. 
 
From melancholic portraits of exile and its folklore to a rogue’s gallery of desperate characters futilely attempting to unearth the animating secrets of the world, each of Bolaño’s short fictions adds yet another door, a window, a secret passage onto the sinister, eerie universe that Bolaño brought to life across his body of work. 
 
Bringing together Last Evenings on Earth, The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho, as well as Bolaño’s posthumously published stories, this new book marks the first time these fictions have been collected in one edition, allowing for a major reappraisal of the vital place that the short story commands for Bolaño’s literary legacy. 
 
‘Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time’ Paul Auster 
 
‘Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled’ Mariana Enríquez

The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolaño

Various

Joyeux Noël! Merry Christmas! These festive stories welcome Christmas à la française – delicious, chic and unexpected. 
 
Sparkling Parisian streets, opulent feasts, wandering orphans, kindly monks, oysters, bonbons, flickering desire, and more than a little wine: this collection of stories proves that the French have truly mastered Christmas. 
 
Bringing together the best French Christmas stories of all time, this lovely book includes classics by Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, plus stories by the esteemed twentieth-century author Irène Némirovsky and contemporary writers Dominique Fabre and Jean-Philippe Blondel. 
 
Let these generous, joyous stories transport you and your loved ones into the heart of a very French Christmas.

A French Christmas

Festive Tales for a Joyeux Noël

Three fiercely original tales. An unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. 
 
Roberto Bolaño's boundless gift for shaping the chaos of reality into fiction is unmistakable across these three novellas. In &lsquo;Cowboy Graves,&rsquo; Arturo Belano &ndash; Bolaño's alter ego &ndash; returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. &lsquo;French Comedy of Horrors&rsquo; finds a seventeen-year-old recruited into a secret society of artists in the sewers of Paris. And in &lsquo;Fatherland,&rsquo; a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
&lsquo;Fascinating... A rare opportunity for the reader to witness the creation of a seemingly inexhaustible body of work&rsquo; El Pais

Cowboy Graves

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE MEMORY POLICE 
 
'A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance' Guardian 
 
Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders – locked in the embrace of an ominous and darkly beautiful web, their fates all converge through the eleven stories here in Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge. As tales of the macabre pass from character to character – an aspiring writer, a successful surgeon, a cabaret singer, a lonely craftsman – Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty. 
 
Translated by Stephen Snyder 
 
Elegant, novellas-in-translation, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

Revenge

&lsquo;This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...&rsquo; 
 
A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protégé in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. A litany unfolds, offering sixty-nine reasons why not to dance with Pablo Neruda. 
 
&lsquo;The melancholy folklore of exile,&rsquo; as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades the fourteen haunting stories of Last Evenings on Earth. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved &lsquo;failed generation,&rsquo; this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolaño&rsquo;s immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;May be the most haunting and mesmerising collection I have ever read&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
&lsquo;It is a shame that Bolaño has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature will be sorely missed&rsquo; Guardian

Last Evenings On Earth

&lsquo;If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear...&rsquo; 
 
A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he's plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation. 
 
Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolaño's best. In addition, two essays are included: provocative and often scathing, they too are alive with Bolaño's trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;An exemplary literary rebel&rsquo; New York Review of Books 
 
&lsquo;A master of the short form&rsquo; Independent 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own&rsquo; New York Times

The Insufferable Gaucho

&lsquo;In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk&rsquo;... 
 
A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with. 
 
Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: The Return is a trove of strangely arresting short master works. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'Dark, intimate and sneakily touching... There is gold to be found in this collection' New York Review of Books 
 
&lsquo;Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts&rsquo; Observer 
 
 &lsquo;A compelling encapsulation of Bolaño's work... You won't be bored&rsquo; Los Angeles Times

The Return

VOLUME ONE OF TWO 
 
'A huge, eye-opening, mind-blowing surprise' Lisa Tuttle, Guardian 
 
A genre-defining-and redefining-collection of fiction's boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient genre, featuring a smorgasbord of stories from across the globe 
 
In The Big Book of Cyberpunk, award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five different countries. Here are tales that both establish and subvert the classic Cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic – from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine their monolithic corporate overlords, daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world, and dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AIs, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons and roguish hackers all collide into rich, thrilling entertainment. Set across two volumes, these are stories that examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures. 
 
We live in an increasingly Cyberpunk world, packed with complex technologies and globalised social trends. It is a world so bizarre that even the futurists couldn’t explain it – though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 offer more than a hundred ways to understand where we are, and where we’re going – or simply the opportunity to venture down dazzling, neon-slicked streets.

The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1

VOLUME TWO OF TWO 
 
'A huge, eye-opening, mind-blowing surprise' Lisa Tuttle, Guardian 
 
A genre-defining-and redefining-collection of fiction's boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient genre, featuring a smorgasbord of stories from across the globe 
 
In The Big Book of Cyberpunk, award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five different countries. Here are tales that both establish and subvert the classic Cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic [RR1] [SN2] – from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine their monolithic corporate overlords, daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world, and dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AIs, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons and roguish hackers all collide into rich, thrilling entertainment. Set across two volumes, these are stories that examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures. 
 
We live in an increasingly Cyberpunk world, packed with complex technologies and globalised social trends. It is a world so bizarre that even the futurists couldn’t explain it – though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 offer more than a hundred ways to understand where we are, and where we’re going – or simply the opportunity to venture down dazzling, neon-slicked streets.

The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 2

Buon Natale -- A Merry Christmas -- made all the more joyful with these literary treats filled with ancient churches, trains whistling through the countryside, steaming tureens, plates piled high with pasta, High Mass, dashed hopes, golden crucifixes, flowing wine, shimmering gifts and plenty of style. 
 
In this collection, classic works by Boccaccio to Pirandello intertwine with more recent stories from writers like Anna Maria Ortese, Natalia Ginzburg and Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda to bring together the greatest festive tales from the land of enchantment: Italy. Bursting with family chaos, carols and yuletide cheer, An Italian Christmas showcases stories that put the passionate, fiery side of the festive period back into Christmas.

An Italian Christmas

Festive Tales for La Dolce Vita (Vintage Christmas Tales)

Susan Hill

A beautiful hardback edition of the famously terrifying ghost story, The Woman in Black, together with four other spine-chilling tales in one beautiful volume. 
 
Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House. The house stands at the end of a causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black - and her terrible purpose. 
 
This illustrated edition includes four of Susan Hill's scariest ghost stories: Dolly, The Man in the Picture, Printer's Devil Court and The Small Hand. 
 
'Heartstoppingly chilling' Daily Express 
 
'No one chills the heart like Susan Hill' Daily Telegraph 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful 
 
Illustrated by Nick Tankard

The Woman in Black and Other Ghost Stories

A special edition of the classic gothic novel

Italo Calvino

A spectacular display of this key European writer's early work 
 
This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as the thirteen tales from his Difficult Loves collection this volume also includes 'Smog', 'A Plunge into Real Estate' and 'The Argentine Ant'. 
 
'The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work, the occasional incandescence of vision, and a certain loveable nuttiness make this collection well worth reading' Margaret Atwood 
 
'If this is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better' Gore Vidal on 'The Argentine Ant'

Difficult Loves and Other Stories

Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems. 
 
'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Marcovaldo

Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, at the age of twelve, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour. These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino's classic triptych of moral tales, now published in one volume and all displaying the exuberant talent of a master storyteller. 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Our Ancestors

These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving. 
 
Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In every story he reveals the hidden meaning beneath the surface of everyday life, and the ludicrousness of war. 
 
Some stories from Last Comes the Raven have been previously available in the collection Adam, One Afternoon. This new expanded collection includes several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein and is an important addition to Calvino's legacy. 
 
'In Last Comes the Raven, a collection of early stories, we find the man behind the magician' New Yorker

Last Comes the Raven

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

'One of the greatest writers of our time' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
 
 Ngugi wa Thiong'o is renowned for his political novels and plays, yet he honed his craft as a short story writer. First published in 1975, Secret Lives and Other Stories brings together a range of Ngugi's political short stories. 
 
From tales of the meeting between magic and superstition, to stories about the modernising forces of colonialism, and the pervasive threat of nature, this collection celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa's best-loved writers.

Secret Lives & Other Stories

John Cheever

Selected and Introduced by Booker-Prize winner Julian Barnes 
 
'Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles: these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room' Anne Enright 
 
John Cheever - the 'Chekhov of the suburbs' - forever altered the landscape of contemporary literature. In a career that spanned nearly fifty years, his short stories, often published in the New Yorker, gave voice to the repressed desires and smouldering disappointments of 1950s America as it teetered on the edge of spiritual awakening and sexual liberation in the ensuing decades. 
 
Selected for the first time, these satirical, fantastical, sad and transcendent stories show Cheever in all his brilliance and continue to speak directly to the heart of human experience. 
 
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

A Vision of the World

Selected Short Stories

Margaret Atwood

Discover this sharp, funny short story collection from the bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments 
 
A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming paler, more silent and literally smaller; a woman's intimate life is strangely dominated by the fear of nuclear warfare; a melancholy teenage love is swept away by a hurricane, while a tired, middle-aged affection is rekindled by the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds... 
 
In these exceptional short stories, by turns funny and searingly honest, Margaret Atwood captures brilliantly the complex forces that govern our relationships, and the powerful emotions that guide them. 
 
‘An acute and poetic observer of the eternal, universal, rum relationships between men and women’ The Times

Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories

From the international bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale, Dancing Girls and Other Stories showcases Margaret Atwood's masterly skill for storytelling. 
 
Students, journalists, farmers, birdwatchers, ex-wives, adolescent lovers - and dancing girls. All ordinary people. 
 
Or are they? 
 
In brilliant flashes of fantasy, humour and unexpected violence, Margaret Atwood reveals the complexities of human relationships and maps the motivations we scarcely know we have within us. Populated with characters who evoke laughter, compassion, terror and recognition, Atwood’s stories show why she remains one of our greatest, most original storytellers. 
 
'A remarkable collection' Sunday Times

Dancing Girls and Other Stories

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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