'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.

Harry Gilmore has no idea of the terrible danger he faces when he meets a beautiful girl in a local student bar. Drugged and abducted, Harry wakes up in a secure wooden compound deep in the Welsh countryside, where he is groomed by the leaders of a manipulative cult, run by the self-proclaimed new messiah known as The Master. When the true nature of the cult becomes apparent, Harry looks for any opportunity to escape. But as time passes, he questions if The Master's extreme behavior and teachings are the one true religion. With Harry's life hanging by a thread, a team of officers, led by Detective Inspector Laura Kesey, investigate his disappearance. But will they find him before it's too late? *Previously published as The Girl in White*

Introduction and Notes by Deborah Parsons, University of Birmingham. 'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore. The subsequent continuity of these six main characters, as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions, is interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature. In pure stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf presents a cross-section of multiple yet parallel lives, each marked by the disintegrating force of a mutual tragedy. The Waves is her searching exploration of individual and collective identity, and the observations and emotions of life, from the simplicity and surging optimism of youth to the vacancy and despair of middle-age.

So was Pemberley all peace, calm and pleasure after Elizabeth Bennet married the sternly handsome Fitzwilliam Darcy? The delightful short story from which this book takes its title tells us in faithful detail how Lizzy fared and how her faithful sister-in-law Georgiana rose Venus-like as a woman with her own will and talents - and made an excellent match into the bargain. In 'Trina', we visit Tsarist Russia and the Tolstoyan setting of St Petersburg, where a headstrong young girl falls for a man who can work on her mind - and her fondness for rubies. Against the backdrop of an era closer to our own, 'Friends and Relations' explores the impact of World War I and a friendly American giant on the tidy lives of a group of middle-class Britons. A keen eye for social differences, a wonderful sense of time and place, and occasional elegiac notes set these stories apart, guaranteeing the reader rich and continuing rewards.

Variety is truly the spice of life throughout, thanks to the inspired imagination of the author of this collection. Via his vision you can experience the hardship of poverty-stricken nineteenth-century England in "When God Looked Down to Help a Child", or futuristic space journeys in "Just One Chance", and the thrill of time travel in "Ahead of His Time". The reader should keep one thing in mind: in the great short story tradition of Vonnegut and Carver, the stories may start off as the ordinary run of the mill kind, but expect the unexpected and the far-from-ordinary.

Frankenstein is the classic gothic horror novel which has thrilled and engrossed readers for two centuries. Written by Mary Shelley, it is a story which she intended would 'curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.' The tale is a superb blend of science fiction, mystery and thriller. Victor Frankenstein driven by the mad dream of creating his own creature, experiments with alchemy and science to build a monster stitched together from dead remains. Once the creature becomes a living breathing articulate entity, it turns on its maker and the novel darkens into tragedy. The reader is very quickly swept along by the force of the elegant prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multi-layered themes in the novel. Although first published in 1818, Shelley's masterpiece still maintains a strong grip on the imagination and has been the inspiration for numerous horror movies, television and stage adaptations.