She brings a much-needed breath of fresh air into the office and ambitiously throws herself into her new job and friendships. But is Alexa all she claims to be? As her life intertwines with Rosie and Jack’s, they must all decide what separates truth from fiction. Will the stories that unfold unite or divide them? Can first impressions ever be trusted?In this original novella, H.A. Leuschel evokes the powerful hold of appearances and what a person is prepared to do to keep up the facade. If you like thought-provoking and compelling reads with intriguing characters, My Sweet Friend is for you.

    O'Leary to Barack Obama. "Flexing impressive literary chops, the beer vendor/creative-writing professor captures both the tough, defensive exterior and the vulnerable, often-broken heart of his city."— Timeout Chicago"Chicago, a page at a time. Michael Czyzniejewski gets right to the point in telling the city's stories." — Chicago Tribune"...Michael Czyzniejewski’s “Chicago Stories,” forty fictional monologues riffing on the common culture of the Windy City’s shared history, projected forward into a possible future. Not quite historical fiction—more like historical jazz." — Newcity Lit"In 'Chicago Stories,' Michael Czyzniejewski summons all of Chicago — its ghosts, living and dead, its heroes and fools, sinners and saints, its people and places and all of its occasions — and in these pages they have gathered, strange and unlikely bedfellows, to sing a new song for Chicago. It will twist your arm behind your back, this song. It will break your fingers."— Billy Lombardo, author of The Man With Two Arms and The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories

    Frederick Barthelme creates an unforgettably wistful cast of characters, ordinary people moving carefully and curiously through a gently painful world.

    This collection is set in the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru.

    After leaving her friend's house, she decides she's going to prove to her brother that "The Lady on the Road " urban legend is just that...

    

    It is not just another day: it is the culmination of hundreds of days, hundreds of disappointments and misunderstandings, and thousands of very small lies... From the Publisher 'Demonstrates a wry talent' Guardian 'A true writer of fiction...A writer whose every book has been a pleasure' Scotsman At the moment that Colonel Browne is standing in the shallow end of the swimming pool of the Hotel Alpenrose, preparing for his late afternoon dip, his daughter Charlotte, carrying a suitcase, is getting out of her car back in England, preparing to rob the ancestral home. It is not just another day: it is the cuilmination of hundreds of days, hundreds of disappointments and misunderstandings, and thousands of very small lies... 'Rose Tremain goes from strength to strength. The Colonel's Daughter is a winner...a riveting and satisfying read' New Statesman 'Dialogue and off-beat humour are spot on' Daily Telegraph.

    It all started soon after her mother, the queen, passed away, when the princess was only twelve. Her father, the king, tries everything to make his little princess sleep, but nothing works. The princess develops such an inability to sleep that she becomes known in her kingdom and far beyond as the Sleepless Beauty.The king wishes Princess Ramya to marry and take over the reins of government, but the princess is determined not to marry till such time as her sleep is restored. Eventually, the king announces a competition whereby whichever prince succeeds in getting Princess Ramya to sleep will win her hand. Meanwhile deadly foes of the kingdom wait and watch in the wings, planning to launch a surprise attack. This exciting, romantic tale, with comic interludes, will appeal to readers of all ages.

    Where darkness never abates, and your deepest fears are just a few steps away. Travel to an old house in the country where something hungry waits just beyond the treeline. Watch as a young woman, whose life hangs in the balance, receives a visitor from the afterlife. Or, journey across an ocean on a romantic voyage that ends in the deepest kind of horror. This dark collection of the macabre is sure to chill the bones of even the most stalwart horror aficionado.

    But there is more to the stranger than what appears on the surface. A Train Story is a flash read (bite-sized stories) by Himanshu Goel, author of Tulsi and A Rational Boy in Love.

    Whether he is writing about the players in a rickety bisexual love triangle or a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home, probing the psychic mainspring of a grimly obsessive weight lifter or sifting through the layers of resentment, need, and pity in a friendship that has gone on a few decades too long, Baxter enchants us with the elegant balance of his prose and the unexpectedness of his insights. Long admired and now once more available in paperback, Harmony of the World is a masterpiece of lucidity and compassion.

    In I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy, Gilchrist writes again of one of her most beloved characters, with the hilarity, wisdom, and poignancy that marks all of her fiction. Here, a clutch of stories are told in the voice of Rhoda -- as a child, as a divorced mother of three sons, and as an old woman, recalling the curse and blessing of being the only daughter of Big Dudley. In The Abortion, a young girl whose father is dying and the boy who loves her struggle with clashing notions of what makes life meaningful. In Remorse, a small town hairdresser revisits the last days of his best friend's life and what he might have done to save her. There is a rich vein of sorrow here, but Gilchrist lightens the burden with a grasp of how both folly and grace are born of love. As her characters, both new and familiar, spin out their unlikely fates, Gilchrist proves once again that there is no other Southern writer quite like her.

    But when old Smiler takes a seat beside him, sucking in pint after pint through his gingery whiskers, a whole new world of battles and bones opens up before him…H. E. Bates – a prolific English novelist and short story writer – wrote 'Castle in the Air' for The Evening News in 1957, but the story was never re-printed in any of his later collections. In fact, its existence was forgotten until 2013 when it was spotted accidentally during a rummage through a newspaper archive. On re-discovering this charming and humorous short story – which exemplifies H.E. Bates's great skill of drawing vivid characters and his ability to create an almost tangible sense of a place – Bates's descendants felt it had to be shared with a wider audience.Bloomsbury Reader is delighted to be re-publishing 'Castle in the Air' alongside the whole body of H. E. Bates's short fiction and novellas, and here we offer it as a free taste of Bates's irresistible writing.

    The exalted, memorable characters in Kirn's acclaimed debut short story col lection confront the real hard bargains in life that spring up from the business of simply living, and Kirn transforms these hard-luck stories into strapping moral lessons which evoke the bonds that unite us all.

    After a night out with his girlfriend in one of the country's remote provinces, he wakes to find himself in a pitch-black coffin—and quickly running out of oxygen. With only his cell phone and his own wits to rely on, it's a race against time to escape the claustrophobic death trap. SIX BULLETS The end of civilization arrived in the form of a giant asteroid thirteen months ago. For Burt James, a survivalist, it was not a complete surprise. He'd spent much of his adult life prepping for such a catastrophe. Consequently, while the majority of the population scoured the post-apocalyptic landscape for water and food, regressing into primitive killers, he bunkered down in his fortified hilltop home in a small town in the middle of the Australian Outback. But now he's out of food and down to his last six bullets, and he will have to make the most difficult choice of his life. THE MAILMAN Los Angeles, 1985. Never was the motto sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll more apt than the scene on the legendary Sunset Strip with the arrival of the underground Hollywood glam bands. While Mick Freeman, a record executive with a major label, works tirelessly to sign five toxic rockers whom he believes might flip the entire music world on its head, his wife, Jade, spends her days bored and alone at home, struggling with a midlife crisis that threatens to topple their twenty-year marriage. And then she meets the new mailman. Young and handsome, he sweeps her off her feet—straight into a nightmare the likes of which she could never have imagined. RE-ROLL In the near future, breathtakingly humanoid robots called Mechs are for sale, and they're designed to fulfill whatever role you want: husband, wife, best friend, slave. Manufacturers allow new owners one free "roll" to randomly determine their Mech's three leading characteristics. But as everybody knows, scoring your ideal traits is a crapshoot, though you can always re-roll—at a price.