Brilliantly funny, terrifying, tender and sharp: the best short stories to come out of lockdown. A vibrant collection of established and emerging authors, including A L Kennedy, Helen Simpson, Alison Moore whose novel The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Amanda Huggins (winner of the Colm Toibin short story award), Richard Lambert shortlisted for The Sunday Times EFG award, Stephen S. Thomson author of Toy Soldiers and Sitting in Limbo for BBC 1 . Introduction by Amanda Craig, long listed for the Women's prize for Fiction 2021. '18 well-chosen stories, loosely based on the idea of solitude, explore loss, loneliness and love, and head from the wilds of the Northern Rockies with an ailing father and an intrepid grieving daughter (Leadfall by D. W. Wilson) to the cable-tangled, neon-jagged streets of Bangkok where, in Stephen Thomas's titular story, a traveller watches the world and thinks the setting is strange to her, but her thoughts are inescapably familiar.'DAILY MAIL

'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.' Zelda FitzgeraldLove is not a singular concept. In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from Philautia, self-love, to Agape, love for humanity; and from Storge, a natural affection for family, to Mania, a frenzied, obsessive love. Seven authors; seven short stories; seven flashes of love. This paperback edition of How Much the Heart Can Hold includes the winning short story from the SceptreLoves short story Prize.