The first new work of fiction since 2013 from one of Canada's most successful, idiosyncratic and world-defining writers, Douglas Coupland. He's called it Binge because it's impossible to read just one. Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that's how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic...

Set in Cornwall, coastal erosion and flooding take on a near mythical power as the short stories in this collection weave in and out of the recent past and near future, as lives and relationships ebb and flow with the tide. From one maritime tragedy to another, the community, and three generations of women from the same family, struggle with their...

Set mostly in the north of the UK, in a near future. Women march together in protest at a government reneging on climate promises. Two glorified paper pushers in Spain help British ex-pats escape a heatwave that will soon lay waste to most of southern Europe. A twitter storm erupts in the panic of a real tempest. In the northeast, a beloved allotme...

A man carries his girlfriend in the left-hand breast pocket of his shirt. During World War II, a young soldier searches the houses and barns of the families with whom he grew up. An astronaut wonders whether she can adapt to life back on earth. In her second collection of short fiction, 100neHundred, Laura Besley explores a kaleidoscope of emotions...

Strange stories about strange things for strange people. Tales of possession and obsession. Of destruction and restoration. Of the demons we hold inside us, and those we leave behind in others. An odd apocalypse freezes a supermarket on Mother’s Day, a vanished village holds an ancient curse, an abandoned ice cream van tears a street apart. R...

16 modern fiction superstars shine a startling light on the romance and pain of the infamous literary pair Heathcliff and Cathy. In 'Terminus' a young woman hides in an empty Brighton hotel; in 'Thicker Than Blood' a man sits in a hot tub stalking his newly-married love on social media; and in 'A Bird, Half-Eaten' an amateur boxer prepares for a ma...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist comes one of the funniest, warmest, most delightful Christmas stories ever.

Experience Star Wars: A New Hope from a whole new point of view.On May 25, 1977, the world was introduced to Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, C-3PO, R2-D2, Chewbacca, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, and a galaxy full of possibilities. In honor of the fortieth anniversary, more than forty contributors lend their vision to this re...

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his e...

Brought to you by Penguin. As she walks out of her marriage, a woman remembers the day her husband rescued a boy from drowning. A blind man on his wedding day celebrates the pursuit of love. And a young man leaves prison with only one desire - to see his son again. Kit de Waal's characters light up the page in vivid stories of thwarted desire, love...

Bellerophon and the winged horse Pegasus launch into the blue sky in search of the dreaded three-headed Chimera, but will success go to the hero's head? Orpheus, devastated by the death of his wife, Eurydice, dares the dangers of the Kingdom of the Dead in an attempt to bring her back to life. Echo loves Narcissus but he only loves himself: a story...

Mma Ramotswe reads the foreword she has written to these African tales, then goes on to narrate them all herself, passing them on to us verbally as her father's aunt did to her. From animal fables to mysterious forces residing in the landscape, this collection demonstrates the wealth and variety of African folk tales and the particular magic of Afr...

Feng Jicai is one of China's best-known writers. Trained as an artist and professional athlete, his life was shattered by events of the Cultural Revolution. As a result of those tumultuous years, he decided to embark upon a career as a professional writer. These two modern stories will introduce you to the idiosyncratic and intriguing world of Chin...

In honour of HRF Keating's 80th birthday, his fellow Detection Club members and the leading lights in crime fiction serve up a new selection of conundrums. The stories are: 'Tuesday's Child' by Lionel Davidson, 'Sherlock Holmes and the Titanic Swindle' by Len Deighton, 'Uncle Harry' by Reginald Hill, 'The Case of the Curious Quorum' by Colin Dexter...

A collection of stories originally published in 1985, which explores the enclosed worlds of illusion and deception, obsession and erroneous authority. The audiobook includes 'Chemistry' which has been studied for GCSE English.

Leslie Norris' stories are among the hidden treaures of modern short story writing. His fiction is one of epiphany and celebration; it charts the personal discoveries, small and large, which shape the growth of character and the intimate relationships between people. Stories include: 'Snowdrops', 'The Girl From Cardigan', 'The Mallard' and many mor...

This audiobook can be seen as a collection of eleven stories that is almost a novel... or a novel broken up into eleven interrelated stories. It resembles a photograph album. A series of clearly observed moments that trace the course of a life, and also of the other lives intertwined with it. Those of parents, of siblings, of children, of friends,...

Melville's 'Bartleby' is a classic American short story, a strange tale of an assiduous copyist whose catch-phrase is 'I would prefer not to'. It is joined here by two other stories from 'The Piazza Tales', Melville's idiosyncratic collection: 'The Lightning-Rod Man' and 'The Bell Tower'.

'Bliss' introduces us to Bertha, who experiences a sense of rapture as she reflects on her life. On her walk home one day, she is overwhelmed by a sense of bliss and contentment. However, her joy later turns to disappointment as she discovers her husband is having an affair with her new friend Pearl. This set also contains five other short stories...

Four Maeve Binchy short stories, exclusively written for BBC Radio 4. Maeve Binchy is one of Britain's most popular storytellers, and these four tales demonstrate the warmth and compassion that have made her many novels bestsellers. In 'Homecoming', read by Sean Campion, the Brennans run Quentin's restaurant in Dublin for the owner, who lives abroa...

Alan Bennett, master storyteller, reads four of his highly-acclaimed stories. The Lady in the Van - An eccentric old lady and her van are told to move on by the council, but a kind homeowner invites her to live in his garden. In this bizarre tale, the homeowner is Alan Bennett and the woman stays for fifteen years. As heard on BBC Radio 4, this edi...