This book contains fifteen entertaining short stories across a range of subjects. The stories include an awkward dinner encounter, an important event that is derailed by the wrong shoes and even a possible transgression involving a controlling wife and a ravenous boar.

The characters in this delicious book are pushed to the point of no return and seek retribution. But how we get even is not always the best road to redemption. On the island of Mull, it takes an incomer to make the locals realise that they need to take matters into their own hands to maintain the community's reputation. In 'The Principles of Soap' the value of friendship overcomes adversity and opportunistic nepotism. In suburban Edinburgh opposing neighbours find out the hard way that the best method of dealing with a canine disturbance is not to bury one's head in the sand. And in the final tale we meet an author on the brink of public ruin who sees the error of his ways after an act of kindness saves the day. These four tales show that the exquisite art of getting even is a skill that sees kindness win over malice. Tantalising and amusing, these stories show off a darker side but carry with them the author's trademark warmth and humour.

In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people-young, old, gay, straight, midwestern, coastal-are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together-to function, work, and survive-while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating? How Other People Make Love contains nine stories. "Win's Girl" features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass," a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "Unity Brought Them Together," a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiancee insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "how do we love?" as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires-all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

What the Wind Saw is a collection of 25 short stories of the people, real and imagined, from a small tract of ancient land in the heart of Hertfordshire. The wind has always blown over these villages, fields, rivers, its towns and its city. It always will. We have the same worries, fears, hopes and dreams today as we have always had. We are connected to each other by our shared experiences, by the places that we live and by the paths that we tread. These are stories of friendship, power, love, grief and ambition inspired by the landscape and what is in it - John Bunyan's Cottage, Shaw's Corner, the annual Ayot St Lawrence art show, the Devil's Dyke, St Albans market, a walk in the woods, a walk across the fields.

'Vivid, memorable and beautifully crafted' - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater 'A brilliant collection, from a remarkable talent' - Joseph O'Connor, author of Shadowplay Hearts and Bones is a book about relationships. It explores what love does to us, and how we survive it. A young woman learns to wield her power, leaving casualties in her wake, while a man from a small town finds solace in a strange new hobby. A watchful child feels a breaking point approach as her mother struggles to keep her life on track, and another daughter steps onto a stage while her family in the audience hope that she is strong enough now to take on the world. First-time lovers make mistakes, brothers and sisters try to forgive one another, and parents struggle and fail and struggle again. Teenage souls are swayed by euphoric faith in a higher power and then by devotion to desire, trapped between different notions of what might be true. Quiet revolutions happen in living rooms, on river banks, in packed pubs and empty churches, and years later we wonder why we ever did the things we did. Set between Ireland and London in the first two decades of this millennium, the stories in Hearts and Bones, Niamh Mulvey's debut collection, look at the changes that have torn through these times and ask who we are now that we've brought the old gods down. Witty, sharply observed and deeply moving, these ten stories announce an extraordinary new Irish literary talent. 'Astute, surprising and wholly entertaining' - Irish Independent 'Showcases Mulvey's strenths as a writer: the strangeness, the originality, the perfect pacing . . . highly accomplished' - Irish Times 'Honest, daringly fresh and stunningly written, these stories cut right to the very essence of what it means to be young' - Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

In the latest of our celebrated series, you find yourself surfacing, dazed in the waiting room. You read snatches of lines over the shoulders of raincoats. In the carriage you have glimpses and visions. At your destination you can hear space, see thunder, taste realization. You are running towards something, someone in the trees who holds out to you an understanding hand. Welcome to the wonderful and sometimes frightening world of Unthology 5.

Stories do not have to be long. In the space of a couple of sentences - or even a page or two - we can see the human heart exposed in a way that is more powerful than in a novel. In Tiny Tales Alexander McCall Smith explores romance, ambition, kindness and happiness in thirty short stories that range in length from the short to the tiny. The settings are as diverse as the characters - Scotland, England, Australia, the United States - combining to create a rich and always surprising selection. An Australian pope?. A persuasive cosmetic surgeon? The world's laziest cat. A group of students living together and getting romantically entangled? All human and animal life is here - in miniature.

Scardio The Seahorse is a non-fiction childrena s book, telling the story of a beautiful racehorse from Indonesia who left his home to become a champion, but unfortunately, over the years fell on hard times. The true story, through its wonderful illustrations tells of Scardioa s fall from grace, but, also how he was then rescued by a local boy. a Scardio the Seahorsea is often referred to as a a 21st century version of Black Beautya for younger children wanting a very happy ending.

For generations of Oxfords residents, students and visitors, Boswells has been part of the city's charm. It was therefore an obvious subject for Oxford Inc, a group of writers who compile stories around a common theme. All sorts of people pass through the department store; they may look just like the rest of us but, underneath the surface, the authors reveal private lives with twists, joy and despair, all of which make for an entertaining read. There are stores here to make you laugh, some will make you cry, and others will make you think; together they present a collection which is a varied and delightful as Boswells, the famous old store which links them all. Boswells are donating a percentage of the profit from every copy they sell to their Charity of the Year.

The second collection of short stories by the author, a retired social worker, covers a wide range of human eperience from the sad to the life-affirming, and we meet some odd, some might say dysfunctional characters along the way.

This unusual collection of stories ranges from the mysterious to the thought-provoking and the downright comic. As a retired social worker the author, whose schooling finished at the end of the Second World War, has brought to bear a lifetime of experience of the quirky side of human nature.

The Norton Introduction to Literature offers the trusted writing and reading guidance students need, along with an exciting mix of the stories, poems and plays instructors want. The Shorter Fourteenth Edition is the most inclusive ever, with more contemporary and timely works sure to engage today's students. New media-rich pedagogical tools further foster close reading and careful writing, making this book the best choice for helping all students understand, analyse and write about literature.

It's never too late to change as the characters in this poignant collection of stories demonstrate. These stories introduce us to a wide range of people young and old as they face up to change and challenge in their lives. Wheather it's learning to ride a bike for the first time in middle age, facing up to demons from the past, dealing with loss and bereavement, or embarking on a life-changing journey, their humanity shines through. They will make you laugh and make you cry but above all they stand as testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. Christine is an English writer married and living in Gloucestershire, her favourite form is the short story and in most of her work we meet characters young and old, male and female who in one way or another are struggling against challenges. She follows their journeys as they deal with their difficulties with grit, determination and sometimes humour.