NOW A #1 BLOCKBUSTING FILM. The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai... Cixin Liu is one of the most important voices in world Science Fiction. A bestseller in China, his novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his short fiction: ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners. This collection's title story, The Wandering Earth, is the biggest SF movie ever to come out of China - taking the world's #1 box office ranking in February 2019. Liu's writing takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate and, above all, survive in a desolate cosmos. 'Cixin's trilogy is SF in the grand style, a galaxy-spanning, ideas-rich narrative of invasion and war' GUARDIAN. 'Wildly imaginative, really interesting ... The scope of it was immense' BARACK OBAMA, 44th President of the United States.

What happens when we leave the places we're from? What do we lose, who do we become, and what parts of our pasts are unshakeable? Linda Mannheim's second short story collection tells the stories of twelve people who have relocated - both voluntarily and involuntarily. Opening with the Miami-set thriller 'Noir', these exquisitely rendered stories will leave you reeling. This Way To Departures is a deeply affecting portrait of American society and the constant search for a place to call 'home'.

LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL PRIZE 2022 SHORTLISTED FOR SHORT STORY OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2022 SHORTLISTED FOR ALCS TOM-GALLON TRUST AWARD 'Unsettling, unpredictable, and brilliant' Roddy Doyle 'In sumptuous and evocative prose, Sheila Armstrong writes stories that are unnerving and unsettling. Stories which make you go, wait, wait, what was that? ' Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground On a boat offshore, a fisherman guts a mackerel as he anxiously awaits a midnight rendezvous. Villagers, one by one, disappear into a sinkhole beneath a yew tree. A nameless girl is taped, bound and put on display in a countryside market. A dazzling and disquieting collection of stories, how to gut a fish places the bizarre beside the everyday and then elegantly and expertly blurs the lines. An exciting new Irish writer whose sharp and lyrical prose unsettles and astounds in equal measure, Sheila Armstrong's exquisitely provocative stories carve their way into your mind and take hold. 'Dark, devilishly well written and full of atmosphere, How to Gut a Fish is one of the most original and affecting short story collections I've read in years' Jan Carson, author of The Fire Starters

Enter a world in which magic exists, hope wins and every woman's heart is alive with courage!This global feast of ancient tales features valiant women overcoming every kind of obstacle and danger to fulfil their destinies. Travel through Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and the Pacific. Shudder, cheer and laugh out loud as the heroines deal with trolls, faeries, dragons and ghosts; admire their knowledge, wit and cunning; marvel at shapeshifting and other manifestations of the supernatural.A rich collection of fairy tales, beautifully illustrated throughout with Joe McClaren woodcuts, this book is stitched together like a series of Scheherazade stories. It is story-telling at its best, pitch perfect fairy tales of fearless women for readers everywhere.

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry--and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it. . . .

There is a life lived beneath the water--among rotted buildings and bloated corpses--by those so overburdened by the world's demands that they simply give up and go under. . . .

In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning "New York Times" notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, "The Drowned Life" showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction's most original artists.

The fourteen short stories in To Cut a Long Story Short show Jeffrey Archer's great skills with a wide variety of character, of subject and of setting, but all with that trademark twist in the tale. Every reader will have their own favourites: the choices run from love at first sight across the train tracks to the cleverest of confidence tricks, from the quirks of the legal profession - and those who are able to manipulate both sides of the Bar - to the creative financial talents of a member of Her Majesty's diplomatic service - but for a good cause. The last story, The Grass is Always Greener, is possibly the best piece Archer has written, and will haunt you for the rest of your life.

'One of the most singular, moving and crucial voices of our times' David Peace In Male Tears, a debut collection of stories that brings together over fifteen years of work, Benjamin Myers lays bare the male psyche in all its fragility, complexity and failure, its hubris and forbidden tenderness. Farmers, fairground workers and wandering pilgrims, gruesome gamekeepers, bare-knuckle boxers and ex-cons with secret passions, the men that populate these unsettling, wild and wistful stories form a multi-faceted, era-spanning portrait of just what it means to be a man.

'One of the greats' - Lucy Caldwell 'Comic brilliance' - Sinead Gleeson 'Ingenious' - The Irish Times 'Daring, funny, heartbreaking' - Observer Following the prize-winning Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine's Belfast is once again illuminated. Meet Drew Lord Haig, called on to sing an obscure hit from his youth at a paramilitary event. Meet Max as he recalls an eventful journey to a Christian film festival. And Mrs Dallesandro who dreams of being a teenager again as she sits in a tanning salon on her wedding anniversary. In these stories, Erskine's characters' wishes and hopes often fall short of their grasp. Brilliantly drawn, Dance Move is about the hugeness of life as seen through glimpses of the everyday. 'A masterpiece' - David Keenan 'Wendy Erskine's debut, Sweet Home, was pitch perfect . . . Dance Move is equally brilliant' - The Daily Mail 'Erskine's stories open slight, but they contain more than it seems possible for short stories to contain' - Keith Ridgway 'She isn't just one of the leading writers of short fiction at work today but one of the leading writers, period.' - Matt Rowland Hill, author of Original Sins As Read on BBC Radio 4 Shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Short Story of the Year

'Nobody believes what they see on TV, so they want to look for something else, an alternate reality, or a conspiracy theory, and it's interesting to explore it, Twitter is fucking full of it, especially now. It's no wonder people round here are into it, but you don't have to read all that shit, just have some mushrooms and wander round Lidl off your tits.' In these fourteen northern tales, Campbell takes us from the edgelands of Manchester to the cloistered villages of The Peak District, Northumberland and Scotland, and illuminates the lives of outsiders, misfits, loners and malcontents with an eye for the darkly comic. A wild-eyed man disturbs the banter in a genial bookshop. A fraught woman seeks to flee a collapsing reservoir. A failed academic finds solace in a crime writer's favourite pub. A transit van killer stalks a railway footpath. A poet accused of plagiarism finds his life falling apart.

In Wilder Winds, Bel Olid presents a stunning collection of short stories that draw on notions of individual freedom, abuses of power, ingrained social violence, life on the outskirts of society, and inevitable differences. Alongside these are small acts of kindness capable of changing the world and making it a better place. Like flowers stubbornly growing and blooming in the cracks of a pavement, Olid's work seeks out beauty without renouncing truth, and never avoids conflict or intimacy. Wilder Winds creates scenes and fragile, yet hardy characters that will stay with the reader for years to come.

Rose Tremain's fiction often finds itself drawn into the 'wide skies and watery byways of East Anglia'. The short stories gathered in 'Wildtrack' convey the sense of isolation, darkness and secrecy the region fosters, a sense that has long fired Tremain's imagination.

An electrifying short story collection from 'one of America's most important novelists' (New York Times); the twice Orange Prize-shortlisted author of the bestselling The History of Love A TIME BOOK OF THE YEAR 'One of our most formidable talents in fiction' ESQUIRE 'Krauss's writing is as lyrical as ever' FINANCIAL TIMES Deftly weaving from one end of life to another - from ageing parents to newborn babies, from a young girl's coming-of-age to an old woman's unexpected delivery of a strange new second youth, from mystery and wonder at a life at its close or at a future waiting to unfold, Nicole Krauss's stories illuminate the moments in the lives of women in which the forces of sex, power and violence collide. With sons and lovers, seducers and friends, husbands lost and regained, or husbands who were never husbands at all, how many men does can a woman's lifetime hold? What does it mean to be a man and a woman together; or a man and a woman, once together and now apart? Beautiful, taut and dark, spinning across the world, from Switzerland, Japan and New York to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles and South America, To Be a Man delves with originality and timeliness into questions of masculinity and violence, regret and regeneration, control and desire; and shines a fierce, unwavering light onto men and women, and into the uncharted gulfs that lie between them.

Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories is a brilliant collection of short stories, personally chosen by Andrea Camilleri. It follows Inspector Montalbano from his very first case in Vigata, in which he stumbles upon a young girl lurking outside a courthouse with a pistol in her handbag. When she is taken in for questioning and won't utter a single word, Montalbano must find another way to learn who she is trying to kill, and why . . . Other cases include a missing woman who has run away from the love of her life; an old married couple who appear to be rehearsing their suicides; and a crime so dark there's only one person the inspector can call for help. With twists and turns aplenty, these short stories have all the wit, mystery and culinary gusto that Camilleri's fans have come to love him for.

A charming collection of stories and fables inspired by Britain's nineteen species of native trees, written by nineteen of Britain's leading authors. Why Willows Weep is edited by Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, and contains beautiful colour illustrations by Canadian artist Leanne Shapton. With sales in hardback of 10,000 this collection has already helped the Woodland Trust plant nearly 50,000 trees across the United Kingdom, and it is now available in paperback for the first time.

Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather′s career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life.

Alongside THE BOHEMIAN GIRL, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "Summer of the Short Story." A story from Lydia Peelle′s forthcoming collection, REASONS FOR AND ADVANTAGES OF BREATHING, will be printed at the back of this volume.

'The devil was going around again and everyone knew because it was in the papers. An usherette in the Metropole saw him at An Apartment for Peggie, eating oranges in a brown trilby; two women in Clery's Bargain Basement came upon him fingering cups in a highly suspicious manner; and The Evening Mail said pretty draper's assistant, Lily Shine, nineteen, from Cabra West, was dancing with a fellow in a brown suit when she felt something funny, looked down, and fainted.' In these unsettling tales of late 1940s Dublin, young Eily Doolin encounters the gentle foot-fetishist next door, the 'Argentinian tango-dancer' from Ballybough, the Jewish couple who introduce her to the delights of carrot cake and Chopin, the 'simple' boy who carries a secret hatred, and, in the climactic closing story, the devil himself. Along the way there are two murders, a suicide, and more illicit sex than Eily can comprehend. Ena May's post-Emergency Dublin is at once recognizable and utterly unlike all previous literary versions of the city. Her gimlet-eyed narrator inhabits secret childhood places as well as the grown-up kitchens and parlours of 'Blarney Park', twitching the veil between public and private, street and home. Ena May has created a remarkable narrative voice, perfectly pitched between the knowing and the naive, the compassionate and the sarcastic, the intrepid and the bewildered. A Close Shave with the Devil, fables of adults at play in a child's world, is a tour de force of storytelling, and a remarkable debut collection.

Though best known for "The Red Badge of Courage," his classic novel of men at war, in his tragically brief life and career Stephen Crane produced a wealth of stories--among them "The Monster," "The Upturned Face," "The Open Boat," and the title story--that stand among the most acclaimed and enduring in the history of American fiction. This superb volume collects stories of unique power and variety in which impressionistic, hallucinatory, and realistic situations alike are brilliantly conveyed through the cold, sometimes brutal irony of Crane's narrative voice.

Shortlised in the 2022 East Anglian Book Awards Some of the characters in Stewkey Blues have lived in Norfolk all their lives. Others are short-term residents or passage migrants. Whether young or old, self-confident or ground-down, local or blow-in, all of them are reaching uneasy compromises with the world they inhabit and the landscape in which that life takes place.

Stranded demonstrates yet again the scope of Val McDermid's imagination, her versatility as a stylist and her immense powers as a storyteller. As well as McDermid's popular series character, private eye Kate Brannigan, this diverse collection contains narrative voices, both female and male, from different continents and an eclectic range of backgrounds. McDermid has chosen the short-story form to probe not only the motivations of the criminal underworld but also the nature of crime itself, all the time playing with crime-writing and pushing it to its limits. There are even occasions where McDermid defies the genre altogether and the collection is framed by two stories that show a writer exploring fresh territory. Grit, sex, glamour, intrigue and unexpected turns: Stranded is a showcase of trademark McDermid that will strike a few surprising chords amongst even her most devoted readers.

"Melville at his best invariably wrote from a sort of dream self, so that events which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper reference to his own soul, his own inner life." - D.H. Lawrence.

Here are ten stories that represent some of the best short work of American master Herman Melville, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," "The Happy Failure," and "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids."

Alongside THE HAPPY FAILURE, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "Summer of the Short Story." A story from Alex Burrett's forthcoming collection, MY GOAT ATE ITS OWN LEGS, will be printed at the back of this volume.

Russian writer Leo Tolstoy is probably best known to the Western world for his epic WAR AND PEACE and splendid ANNA KARENINA, but during his long lifetime Tolstoy also wrote enough shorter works to fill many volumes. Reprinted here are two of his finest short novels -- FAMILY HAPPINESS and MASTER AND MAN -- and one short story -- ALYOSHA THE POT

Alongside FAMILY HAPPINESS, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "Summer of the Short Story."