The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its eleventh year. Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume. This new anthology includes stories by Julia Armfield, A.J. Ashworth, Iphgenia Baal, Emma Bolland, Tom Bromley, Gary Budden, Jen Calleja, Robert Dewa, John Foxx, Josephine Galvin, Uschi Gatward, Meave Haughey, Hilaire, Alice Jolly, Isha Karki, Yasmine Lever, Simon Okotie, Mel Pryor, Douglas Thompson and Matthew Turner.

When her parents die in a car accident, highly talented Austrian physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with a problem. Her parents' will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home - but for strangers, the village of Gross-Einland remains stubbornly hidden from view. When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that exerts a strange control over the lives of the villagers. There are hidden clues about the hole everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it - not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is in jeopardy. In the literary tradition of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Raphaela Edelbauer's tale of trauma and history weaves an opaque dream fabric that is frighteningly true to life, and in the process she turns us towards the abject horror that lies beneath repressed memory. The Liquid Land is a dangerous novel, at once glittering nightmare and dark reality, from an extraordinary new voice.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2019 AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER When Gilbert wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees - immediately and inexplicably - for Tokyo, where he meets a fellow lost soul: Yosa, a young Japanese student clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide. Together, Gilbert and Yosa set off on a pilgrimage to see the pine islands of Matsushima, one looking for the perfect end to his life, the other for a fresh start. Playful and profound, The Pine Islands is a beautiful tale of friendship, transformation and acceptance in modern Japan.

A young woman goes on a perilous journey in search of her absent father. What ensues is a Freudian adult fairytale in this exciting debut by young Swiss author Michelle Steinbeck. A child attacks Loribeth with an iron while she is sleeping. In retaliation Loribeth throws the iron onto the child from an upstairs window, packs the damaged body into a suitcase and sets off on her travels. Thus starts Steinbeck's unusual, poetic novella about a young woman's transition from childhood to adulthood.

Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a life of addiction, from the epiphany of the first drag to the perennial last last cigarette. Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behaviours. He extends the conversation with other smokers to meditations on Mark Twain and Italo Svevo, the nature of habit, the validity of hypnosis, and the most insignificant city in the United States, where he lived for far too long. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of the dependency and offers a brilliant disquisition on the psychopathology of addiction.