When her mother left her alcoholic father and set up home in a tiny attic room above a doctor's surgery, Janice Galloway quickly learned how to keep quiet and stay out of the way. Her mother hadn't expected or wanted another child and Galloway wasn't allowed to forget that she was a burden. Her much older sister Cora, with her steady stream of boyfriends, her showy fashions, and erratic temperament, never failed to remind her of her insignificance. Galloway's Scottish childhood is defined by the intimate details of her environment, where every family member looms close. With startling precision she remembers scenes of domestic life: her mother's weekly round of washing, the sodden tweed dripping on the line; Cora putting on layers of make up for the Ayrshire night life; learning to write--and control the often rebellious letters; the living quality of her mother's mangy old fur coat. In these cramped conditions, ignored by her elders, Galloway is a silent observer, carefully and keenly watching the people around her. As her rage grows, she begins to think for herself. Slowly, unexpectedly, she finds her voice. Out of the silent child emerges the girl who will be a writer.

In this powerful collection, Janice Galloway takes on David Lodge's assertion that 'literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round'. Her multi-layered stories not only explore sex and sexuality, but parenthood, relationships, the connections between generations, death, ambition and loss. Here are sixteen razor-sharp tales about the raw and poignant stuff of life, from one of Scotland's best loved and most acclaimed authors.

From the cruel irony of 'A member of the Family' to the fateful echoes of 'The Go-Away Bird' and the unexpectedly sinister 'The Girl I Left Behind Me', in settings that range from South Africa to the Portobello Road, Muriel Spark probes the idiosyncrasies that lurk beneath the veneer of human respectability, displaying the acerbic wit and wisdom that are the hallmarks of her unique talent. The Complete Short Stories is a collection to be loved and cherished, from one of the finest short story writers of the twentieth century.

In the second volume of her memoirs, the prize-winning author Janice Galloway reveals how the child introduced in This is Not About Me evolved through her teenage years. When she started secondary school, Galloway was still sharing a bed with her mother and was more excited by Latin and school orchestra than by boys. But as she struggled with the physical and emotional changes of adolescence, almost everything she thought she knew began to change. Combining visceral descriptions of puberty, sex and school-room politics with the story of a family's secrets, Galloway casts her gaze on the morals and ambitions of one small town, in writing that is personal, defiant and eloquent.

From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. As memories of the deaths of her lover and mother surface unbidden, life for Joy narrows - to negotiating each day, each encounter, each second; to finding the trick to keep living. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time.

A classic of short fiction, Alan Spence's celebrated debut collection, first published in 1977, brings Glasgow to vibrant life and captures the spirit of the city as it teetered on the brink of change. From childhood Christmases in small tenement flats and games played on scrubland, to Orange Walks on bright Saturday afternoons and Thursday nights in dark, pulsing dancehalls, these interlinked stories vividly evoke the city and its inhabitants - young and old, Catholic and Protestant, hopeful and disillusioned.

"VALENTINE'S DAY MAKES ME EMBARRASSED," writes Janice Galloway in the opening lines of Where You Find It. The collection deals with love in its many guises -- the way relationships suddenly turn; how a look, a gesture, a word can heal or hurt. Love in Galloway's world is more likely to resemble a heart-shaped ham sandwich than the flowers and chocolates that bear the standard in more traditional "love stories." In the manner of Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver, Galloway's tales explore the psychological aspects of love and the overpowering yearning to communicate. Whether it's the title piece, which tells of a prostitute's passion for her pimp's kisses, or "Valentine," in which a celebratory evening is undermined by minor disappointments and misunderstandings, the stories that comprise Where You Find It assume that powerful feelings always contain a dimension of disturbance. Upon the collection's much-lauded publication in the United Kingdom, one reviewer was moved to predict that Janice Galloway "will certainly end up in anthologies: not Best Scottish Writers or Best Women Writers, but, quite simply, best."

With "some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet" (The Times, London), Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann. This impassioned novel gives voice to Clara Wieck Schumann, one of the most celebrated pianists of the nineteenth century, who today is best remembered not for her music but for her marriage. "How often you must purchase my songs with invisibility and silence, little Clara," says Robert, and, for Clara, the price of his love is dear. Shrouded in alternate layers of music and silence, the Schumann union was anything but a lullaby, marked by her valiant struggle for self-expression and his tortuous descent into madness. With Clara, a deeply moving fugue of love, solitude, and artistic creation, Janice Galloway "has taken a melodic line and scored it for an orchestra" (The New York Times Book Review). Source: Simon & Schuster Last Updated: 12/29/2003 Last Sent to NetRead: 12/27/2008 Author Bio Janice Galloway's Clara was named the 2002 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year. Galloway is the author of the story collections Blood and Where You Find It and the novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, winner of the 1990 MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year Award, and Foreign Parts, which won the 1994 McVitie's Prize. In 1994 she also won the E. M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Janice Galloway's new novel is based on the life of Clara Schumann: celebrated nineteenth-century concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms - who was also the wife of Robert Schumann, the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him through a series of crippling mental illnesses. Clara is a meticulously researched account of two remarkable and highly dramatic musical careers, but primarily it is a novel about timeless, common things: about the inescapable influences of childhood, about creativity and marital life, about communication and silence, about how art is made and how art, in turn, may erode or save the life that nourishes it.

Clara takes as its heart an examination of the place of love in a life of increasing isolation and alienation.

Comprising stories from her debut collection, Blood, and the critically acclaimed Where You Find It - this collection presents some of the best known and most loved works by one of Scotland's 'most gifted and original writers' (Times Literary Supplement). Each sharply observed, savagely accurate and brilliantly realised - the stories offer revelatory glimpses into everyday lives - from an unwelcome act of kindness at a bus stop, an evening walk across a London bridge, a welcome but uncomfortable summer break to a brutal lesson in trust. Here also are unflinching portrayals of relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the world falls away leaving only the lovers. These are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, funny and terrifyingly true, from a master of the form.