'To read Mothers is to take a journey through a landscape familiar enough to console, yet strange enough to unsettle. The thrills and dangers of such a journey lie with the unexpectedness of life's undercurrents and our uncertain, unknowable selves. Chris Power's quiet yet compelling touch is reminiscent of Alice Munro and Peter Stamm.' - Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants

Chris Power's stories are peopled by men and women who find themselves at crossroads or dead ends - characters who search without knowing what they seek. A woman uses her mother's old travel guide to navigate nowhere; a stand-up comic with writer's block performs a fateful gig at a cocaine-fulled bachelor party; on holiday in Greece, a father must confront the limits to which he can keep his daughters safe.

From remote and wild Exmoor to ancient Swedish burial sites and hedonistic Mexican weddings, these stories lay bare the emotional and psychic damage of life, love and abandonment.

Mothers proves the vital importance of short fiction and announces the debut of an exceptional literary voice.

A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021 A Metro Book of the Year 2021 A Washington Post '10 Best Thriller and Mystery Books of 2021' 'A taut, subtle, postmodern literary thriller.' SUNDAY TIMES 'A remarkable debut; an accomplished and intricately plotted story.'-JON McGREGOR 'A Lonely Man is a delicate snare of a novel.'-BRANDON TAYLOR 'A thrilling, unnerving novel. a page-turner with exacting syntax and emotional heft.'-CATHERINE LACEY 'Impressively deft. A Lonely Man is a tense and taut work.'-BENJAMIN MYERS 'A classy page-turner.' MAIL ON SUNDAY Robert is a struggling writer living in Berlin with his wife and two young daughters. One night he meets Patrick, an enigmatic stranger with a sensational story to tell: a ghostwriter for a Russian oligarch - recently found hanged - who is now being followed. But is he really in danger? Patrick's life strikes Robert as a fabrication, but one that comes to obsess him. He decides to use the other man, and his story. An elegant and atmospheric twist on the cat-and-mouse narrative, A Lonely Man is a novel of shadows, of the search for identity and the elastic nature of truth. As his association with Patrick hurtles towards tragedy, Robert must decide: are actual events the only things that give a story life, and are some stories too dangerous to tell?