FEMINIST TALES FROM JAPAN BY THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF WHERE THE WILD LADIES ARE

Piercing, inventive, and darkly humorous, the fifty-two stories in Aoko Matsuda’s The Woman Dies explore the persistent and pervasive sexism faced by women in modern-day Japan.

The normalization of violence against women on screen and in the media is confronted in the story ‘The Woman Dies’, while others invest inanimate objects with their own perspectives, examine the aesthetics of technology, and use clever wordplay to riff off the absurdity of contemporary life.

Masterfully translated by Polly Barton, the translator of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, The Woman Dies is more than a simple thrill ride. Blending humour, surrealism, and sharp social critique, it’s a vast, multifaceted theme park of ideas by one of Japan’s most exciting writers.

The tight-knit Izquierdo family is grappling with misfortunes none of them can explain. Their beloved patriarch has suffered from an emotional collapse and is dying; eldest son Gonzalo's marriage is falling apart as he tries to care for his father; daughter Dina, beleaguered by fear that her nightmares are real, is a shut-in. When Gonzalo digs up a strange object in the backyard of the family home, the Izquierdos take it as proof that a jealous neighbour has cursed them-could this be the reason for all their troubles? As the Izquierdos face a distressing present and an uncertain future, they are sustained by the blood that binds them and a divine presence which manifests in visions, signs, wonders and an abiding love for one another. Told in a series of soulful voices brimming with warmth and humour, Ruben Degollado's book is a tender narrative of a family at a turning point.

Welcome to New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Brandon Sanderson's first collection of short fiction. These wonderful works, originally published individually, have been collected for the first time and convey the true expanse of the Cosmere. Telling the exciting tales of adventure Sanderson fans have come to expect, Arcanum Unbounded include the Hugo Award-winning novella 'The Emperor's Soul', an excerpt from the graphic novel 'White Sand', and the never-before-published Stormlight Archive novella 'Edgedancer'. The collection will include nine works in all: 'Edgedancer' (Stormlight Archive) 'The Hope of Elantris' (Elantris) 'The Eleventh Metal' (Mistborn) 'The Emperor's Soul' (Elantris) 'Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania' (excerpt; Mistborn) 'White Sand' (excerpt; Taldain) 'Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell' (Threnody) 'Sixth of Dusk' (First of the Sun) 'Mistborn: Secret History' (Mistborn) This superb collection also includes essays and illustrations which offer an insight into the numerous worlds in which the stories are set.

Harper Lee remains a landmark figure in the American canon – thanks to Scout, Jem, Atticus, and the other indelible characters in her Pulitzer-winning debut, To Kill a Mockingbird; as well as for the darker, late-’50s version of small-town Alabama that emerged in Go Set a Watchman, her only other novel, published in 2015 after its rediscovery. Less remembered, until now, however, is Harper Lee the dogged young writer, who crafted stories in hopes of magazine publication; Lee the lively New Yorker, Alabamian, and friend to Truman Capote; and the Lee who peppered the pages of McCall’s and Vogue with thoughtful essays in the latter part of the twentieth century.

The Land of Sweet Forever combines Lee’s early short fiction and later nonfiction in a volume offering an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice. Covering territory from the Alabama schoolyards of Lee’s youth to the luncheonettes and movie houses of midcentury Manhattan, The Land of Sweet Forever invites still-vital conversations about politics, equality, travel, love, fiction, art, the American South, and what it means to lead an engaged and creative life.

This collection comes with an introduction by Casey Cep, Harper Lee’s appointed biographer, which provides illuminating background for our reading of these stories and connects them both to Lee’s life and to her two novels.

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.

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.

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.

'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

Religious fanaticism, political intrigue and the heart-wrenching tale of a lost child . . . with women firmly centre stage' – The Mail on Sunday

A gripping story of one family’s fight to survive against the devastating tides of history, The City of Tears by Kate Mosse is an epic adventure, sweeping from Carcassonne to Paris and Amsterdam.

Paris, 1572. For ten violent years, the Wars of Religion have raged across France. Now, peace has been brokered and a royal engagement announced that could see the country reunited at last.

An invitation has arrived for Minou Joubert and her family to attend the wedding. Little does she know that her family’s most dedicated enemy will also be there, that the Jouberts will soon be forced to flee for their lives to Amsterdam, and that someone she loves dearly will disappear without a trace . . .

'Elisa said Yes and I said Yes. We said Yes in all the European languages. Yes. We said yes we said yes, yes to vague but powerful things, we said yes to hope which has to be vague, we said yes to love which is always blind, we smiled and said yes without blinking.' ('A Better Way to Live') ----------- How does love change us? And how do we change ourselves for love - or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. In Vienna, an icy woman seduces a broken man; in London, a bird mimics an old-fashioned telephone; in adland, a sleek copywriter becomes a kind of shaman. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour and curiosity, stories about what it means to live and love, together and alone.

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.

This beautifully designed paperback featuring three Christmas-themed stories by a world-renowned classic writer will make the perfect stocking-stuffer purchase. This paperback will feature 3 Christmas-themed stories by the author, led by "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," a tale acknowledged as a precursor to Dickens's beloved classic A Christmas Carol. Other featured stories include "What Christmas Is as We Grow Older" and "A Christmas Dinner." This book will be accompanied by three similar titles: Christmas with L.M. Montgomery, Christmas with Louisa May Alcott, and Christmas with O. Henry. The book will feature elegantly designed covers and endpapers, quality paper stock for interiors, and card-stock covers (with flaps).