Modern & contemporary fiction

In Dianne Williams' stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life. In perfec...

Combining elements of both Chinese materiality - the love of physical things - and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and oblivion....

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships - with friends, roommates, siblings - while trying to move forward into an uncertain future.

In his first-ever short story collection, which spans 40 years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, author Alan Moore presents nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, each taking us deeper into the fantastical underside of reality.

'A fox could be a shape-shifter, a spirit being. It could appear in human form if this suited its purposes; it could come and go as it pleased, play tricks, lead men astray'. An escapee from a cult in Japan; an animal activist with something to hide; a cafe-owner in Sydney reconnecting with her e...

Written by P.G. Wodehouse, this story follows the adventures of Bertie Wooster. His Aunt Agatha decides it is time for Bertie to abandon his life of frivolity in favour of wedding bells. Can Jeeves save him from marriage?

The title is a Potteries' saying that means it's looking a bit bleak, a little like rain - an expression that sums up this fabulous debut collection of award-winning stories by Lisa Blower. Blower celebrates her characters with stories that they wouldn't want told. She makes the bleak funny, in a...

A remarkable collection of dark, funny and haunting short stories from the inimitable author of 'The Lottery'. An anxious devil, an elderly writer of poison pen letters and a mid-century Jack the Ripper; a pursuit though a nightmarish city, a small boy's thrilling train ride with a female thief, ...

Essential to Virginia Woolf's development as a novelist, these short stories are among the most interesting and accomplished fictions she wrote.

Five close friends in their 90s meet - as they have for decades - for their monthly 'ladies lunch', to puzzle, and laugh at, the enigmas and affronts of ageing. When one of their number is placed unhappily in a home the others conspire to spring her. Lore Segal's witty, yet poignant, short story,...