Fiction - Short Stories

This third collection of short stories by Alice Tawhai explores the complex mix of beauty and heartache, resilience and joys of people living in seemingly bleak situations. The perceptions of people and their lives are fresh and poignant, seeing the humanity and quiet hope alongside the darkness. The vivid imagery and intensely evocative writing make each story and those in them hauntingly memorable.

Forecast: Turbulence is a breathtaking and exquisitely lyrical collection of nine short stories and one memoir piece from Janette Turner Hospital. Featuring a compelling and enigmatic cast of characters - a loner obsessed with the beautiful face of a neighbour; a militant religious cult; the mute skipper of a whale-watching boat; a teenager who hasn't set eyes on his father since the breakdown of his parents' marriage; the daughters of a charming family man (and paedophile); a child and his grandmother sitting out a hurricane; two ... read more

Chosen as a Fiction Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph by Maggie O'Farrell In this witty and subversive collection of stories, Michele Roberts explores women's desires, memories and loves as only she can. A jilted woman skirts the edges of time and place as she walks the streets of London at night; another returns to the scene of her honeymoon without her husband; a wife takes apt revenge on her vegetarian husband ...

From the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to the speed and heat of summer London, to an eerily still lake in the Finnish wilderness, Sarah Hall evokes landscapes with extraordinary precision and grace. The characters within these territories are real-life survivors, but whether it's a frustrated housewife seeking extreme experience or a young woman contemplating the death of her lover, dark devices and desires rise to the surface. And the human body, too - flawed, visceral, and ful... read more

The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this dazzling new collection. At its centre are three stories connected into one marvellously rich narrative about Juliet - who escapes from teaching at a girls' school and throws herself into a wild and passionate love match. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and deso... read more

A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming pale, 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.

A wife and mother, whose spirit has been crushed, finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely place. The young victim of a humiliating seduction (which involves reading Housman in the nude) finds an unusual way to get her own back and move on. An older woman, dying of cancer, weaves a poisonous story to save her life. Other stories of this title uncover the 'deep holes' in marriage and their consequences, the dangerous intimacy of girls and the cruelty of children. The long title story follows Sophia Kovalevsky, ... read more

Strange creatures are loose in Miramar, desperate survivors cling to the remains of a submerged country, humanity's descendants seek to regain what they've lost, and the residents of Gisborne reluctantly serve alien masters. The visions of New Zealand - and beyond - painted in this collection of short stories are both instantly recognisable, and nothing like the place we know. A Foreign Country brings together the work of established authors and fresh voices to showcase the range of stories produced by New Zealand's growing communi... read more

Adriatic Blue is an anthology of 30 short stories from New Zealand to Croatia with some unexpected detours along the way.

In the nine captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Toibin delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence, each of Toibin's stories manages to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning ... read more

Heading Inland is a funny, broody, saucy collection of stories about the kind of people you sometimes meet but might prefer to ignore. Barker creates a wonderfully fantastical and unimaginable world: an unborn baby escapes an unsuitable mother through a secret belly-button zip; a wayward and yet enigmatic man attempts to rescue eels from an East End pie shop; a young woman discusses her fascination in other women's breasts; a boy with his inside organs back to front desperately seeks attention; and a bitter old woman becomes bent o... read more

This is the complete collection of stories from one of the most original and powerful American writers of the twentieth-century. Including "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge", this collection also contains several stories only available in this volume.

For readers of Melissa Bank or Jhumpa Lahiri: witty, seductive stories of expatriate women, their loves and losses. "Interesting women -- are we ever going to be free of them? I meet them everywhere these days, now that there is no longer such a thing as an interesting man..." So drawls the narrator of one of Andrea Lee's jewel-like stories, herself, undeniably, an Interesting Woman. These gleaming, sensual stories bend a wit worthy of Colette's on a demimonde of expatriates, teenage "pocket divas," girlfriends, wives, mistresses ... read more

This series is introducing 12 intoxicating short stories from 12 of Picador's most exciting writers. The Shots aim to promote the short story as well as the work of some Picador's greatest authors. They will be contemporarily packaged but ultimately disposable books that are the ideal literary alternative to a magazine. Jackie Kay's Sonata is one of the first Picador Shots and comes from her new collection, Wish I Was Here. In Sonata, two strangers meet on a train and connect in a way that one only can when you know that you ... read more

In the 1980s Tim Winton made his mark with tough, spare stories about youth and promise, of early parenthood and the challenges of loyalty. Now, almost twenty years since his last collection, he returns to the form with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia.Here are turnings of all kinds

Hemingway's passion for Spain and the bullfight is renowned. This book contains some of the finest short stories Hemingway ever wrote, inspired by the intense life as well as the inevitable death of those hot, violent afternoons.

The hundred short stories collected here include such masterpieces as "Bella-Vista", "The Tender Shoot" and "Le Kepi", Colette's subtle and ruthless rendering of a woman's belated sexual awakening. Shot through with the colours and flavours of the Parisian world and fertile French countryside, these short stories reverberate with the fine-spun desire, wit and psychological acuity that made Colette unique.

With characters ranging from vengeful Brownies to a boy who bails his dad out of jail, Z.Z. Packer writes of an urban south that more saccharine southern novels eschew. This is her first fiction collection, but her work has already won awards.

Through the words of his own 'diary', we watch as Poe succumbs to existential loneliness during a sociological experiment in an isolated lighthouse, stranded for a year with no companion but his faithful dog...Dickinson is brought back to life in an imagined future era, when a husband and wife buy her as a servant-robot/clone, eager for her to write her charming verses while she does the chores...Samuel Clemens (Twain) dotes on his 'Angelfish', a group of young girls aged 10-15 who he insists should call him Grandpa and on whom he ... read more

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