It’s a bold lie, but it might just work…’------------X------------A Wander Through the Village is the perfect companion to the Greek Village Series and is a must read for any enthusiasts of author Sara Alexi’s collection. In this guide to the Greek Village there is a selection of short stories in which we catch up with old friends from previous books, and are given the chance to meet some new ones. And just so we can keep on top of all the comings and goings of our favourite characters, there is a who’s who of all who have appeared in the books so far, along with a glossary of Greek phrases which are used to so vividly describe the culture.A Wander Through the Village is also packed full of Sara’s personal anecdotes from life in Greece, providing insight into the inspiration behind each novel. Stunning images of Greece chosen by Sara run throughout, and you will find maps of both the village and Orino Island, helping to transport you to your best-loved Greek destinations. There are even questions that can be used in book clubs - this guide has it all for book lovers everywhere.But newcomers to the series, please note, if you haven’t read all the books in the series then handle with care, as the handbook section includes spoilers!If you enjoyed A Wander Through the Village, you’ll love book nineteen in the series, A Stranger in the Village. Find it on Amazon now!

    In Liverpool, the blackout blinds may be coming down, but one family is about to face devastating misfortune… Dora Evans is finally marrying the love of her life, Joe Rodgers, and her dreams of opening a dressmaking business look as if they might come true. With twin daughters on the way, Dora has everything she’s ever wanted.  But then tragedy strikes: one of Dora’s babies dies in infancy, and a catastrophic fire changes their lives forever. Dora is consumed with grief, struggling to get through each day and Joe is suddenly distant, finding solace in his colleague, Ivy.  With Ivy watching and scheming, and Dora battling against her own demons, can she keep her family together? The Lost Daughter of Liverpool is a heartbreaking and gripping story of love, loss and hope. Perfect for fans of Nadine Dorries, Diney Costeloe and Kitty Neale. Discover Pam’s new series, The Mersey Trilogy, today. Read what everyone’s saying about The Lost Daughter of Liverpool: "Absolute belter of a story!!" Chelle's Book Reviews “I loved this book! … have a supply of tissues ready … a beautifully written book that kept me reading until the early hours. I just didn’t want it to end.” 5* Stardust Book Reviews “A new favourite saga writer to add to my list.” 5* Bookworms & Shutterbugs “I love this book so much … [it will] keep you gasping for more … Oh my dayz.” 5* Read Along With Sue Ward “One of the best family sagas I've read … A wonderful, emotional roller coaster of a read, highly recommended … tissues are essential!” Brook Cottage Books “A deeply moving story…I found myself gasping out loud … [it] brought me close to tears … I found The Lost Daughter of Liverpool increasingly hard to put down … I will certainly be back for part two … definitely one to watch out for.” Em the Bookworm “The story is brilliant … Once I started this book, I just couldn't wait for every chance I got to read it.” 4* I Love Reading “What a beautiful book! Brilliantly written, this warm-hearted, evocative tale was amazing from start to finish.” 5 * Renita D’Silva “Oh wow, absolutely superb. Read it in under two days. Loved everything about this book. A fantastic story and I'm so excited for the next one in this trilogy.” Goodreads Reviewer “The storyline was brilliant and had me hooked from the first chapter, really looking forward to reading the follow up.” 5* Goodreads Reviewer “…Just fantastic. Being a big fan of family saga’s, this book didn’t disappoint, it had it all. Love, heartbreak, obsession, loss and hope.

    Although social realities -- racial and ethnic tensions, sexual harassment, and abuse -- make up their background, these are really love stories in which people discover and forgive one another. A daughter finds her father's kindness extends beyond her and their family; a wife discovers and forgives the affair between her husband and best friend; and, in the title story which takes the form of a letter to an almost-lover, the narrator winds through swirling eddies of memory and language to relate her present and past lives and the loves that have informed them.Written with a masterful sureness of hand and heart, these captivating, intimate stories display Sena Jeter Naslund's extraordinary presence as one of today's most rewarding writers of fiction.

    When Poppy is left fatherless, her world becomes fraught with danger, men vying to claim her as their own.Her one ray of hope is Robert, a young engineer, who she meets one day by the tracks. But his wealthy family have different plans for him… Can Poppy ever hope to win his heart?And would she give up her whole way of life for him?A compelling, heartwarming story about one girl’s brave search for happiness against all odds…

    It is the first of what will hopefully become an annual, non-themed horror anthology of entirely original stories, showcasing the very best short fiction that the genre has to offer. Contents List:BUTTERFLY ISLAND by C.J. TudorRESEARCH by Tim LebbonSWANSKIN by Alison LittlewoodTHAT’S THE SPIRIT by Sarah LotzGAVE by Michael BaileyWHEREVER YOU LOOK by Ramsey CampbellSAME TIME NEXT YEAR by Angela SlatterMINE SEVEN by Elana GomelIT DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT by Michael Marshall SmithCREEPING IVY by Laura PurcellLAST RITES FOR THE FOURTH WORLD by Rick CrossWE ALL COME HOME by Simon BestwickTHE IMPORTANCE OF ORAL HYGIENE by Robert ShearmanBOKEH by Thana NiveauMURDER BOARD by Grady HendrixALICE’S REBELLION by John LanganTHE MIRROR HOUSE by Jonathan Robbins LeonTHE NAUGHTY STEP by Stephen VolkA HOTEL IN GERMANY by Catriona WardBRANCH LINE by Paul FinchFLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

    An entire community was destroyed. For many people affected by this tragedy, the psychological scars may never heal.Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a condition that affects many people who have endured traumatic events, leaving them unable to move on from life-changing tragedies. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the focus was rightly placed on providing food, shelter and health care for those left homeless – but it is important that we don’t lose sight of the psychological impact this fire will have had on its survivors.24 Stories is an anthology of short stories, written on themes of community and hope, by a mix of the UK’s best established writers and previously unpublished authors, whose pieces were chosen by Kathy Burke from over 250 entries.Contributors include: Irvine Welsh, A. L. Kennedy, Meera Syal, John Niven, Pauline Melville, Daisy Buchanan, Christopher Brookmyre, Zoe Venditozzi, Nina Stibbe, Mike Gayle, Murray Lachlan Young, Barney Farmer.

    But when war breaks out across Europe and her older brother enlists, nothing will ever be the same again.As men leave for the war in droves, the girls must take on whatever work they can find to make ends meet. High-risk work in munitions factories and back-breaking domestic labour seem to be all that’s available to them, but Rose has other ideas…A tale of love and heartbreak, triumph and resilience, this sweeping saga by best-selling author Beryl Kingston takes the reader inside the extraordinary lives of ordinary women in Wartime London.A Stitch in Time was first published in 1995 as Alive and Kicking.

    A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.The leopard --Granddaughters --The Grozny Tourist Bureau --A prisoner of the Caucasus --The tsar of love and techno --Wolf of White Forest --Palace of the people --A temporary exhibition --The end

    She's never fitted in before - is this her chance to find where she really belongs?Finally Melissa has the allotment she's been longing for to distract her while her husband works away - even if it is chest-high in weeds. But when she looks for help in the wrong place, she finds she's the hottest topic of gossip.For Dottie, her allotment and part-time job of 'a little light dusting' at Lerwick Manor keeps a spring in her eighty-year-old step - and her ears open for secrets.Though generations apart, these three women are about to find a common bond in a new-found passion and that true friendship can grow anywhere.

    Just as the Roman poet reinvigorated the Greek Classical legends 700 years after Homer, so Mason now gives us a radical and exciting renovation of those myths, 2,000 years after Ovid.It retells the great stories of Narcissus, Orpheus, Persephone, Icarus, Midas, Medea and Actaeon, and strings them together like the stars in constellations – with even Ovid himself entering the narrative. It’s as though the ancient mythologies had been rewritten by Borges or Calvino – or artificial intelligence – and brought glimmering back into our world. Metamorphica re-engages with the elemental power of the ancient shape-changing gods by keeping their essences while rewriting their stories. It is this extraordinary narrative approach that is so thrilling; we watch as the author extracts more and more out of the original legend – adding infinite perspectives to narratives we thought we knew. Mason understands that the great myths are parables – always in flux, always relevant – always throwing shards of light from the morning of the world.

    A bookseller's unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl's loss of innocence at the hands of her employer's son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King's enduring subject of love.

    In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on – and reinvents – her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

    journalist, learns of a local legend. The deceptively simple fable about the thirteenth gift has a profound effect on Claire, which soon transforms her marriage, her work, and the way she sees the world. The Thirteenth Gift is both a cautionary tale and an inspirational fable as it shows a way through the perilous consequences of greed, arrogance, and abuse of power to an uplifted state of consciousness and community. The Thirteenth Gift invites readers to renew their own sense of wonderment, which can lead to freedom from fear and a greater experience of hope, beauty, and joy in daily life. Like the message of the award-winning book, The Twelve Gifts of Birth, this novella from Charlene Costanzo reminds readers to see the dignity that is inherent in themselves and others.

    The stories are gorgeous in themselves, but the way they speak to each other is truly extraordinary.”—Elizabeth McCracken, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination From the author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index, a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding, much less controlling, it. In these seven beautifully wrought variations on a theme, a series of characters trace and retrace eternal yet ever-changing patterns of love and longing, connection and loss. The stories range over centuries and continents—from eighteenth-century Vienna, where Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte are collaborating on their operas, to America in the 1940s, where a love triangle unfolds among a doctor, a journalist, and the president’s wife. A race-car driver’s widow, a nursing-home resident and her daughter, a paralyzed dancer married to a famous choreographer—all feel the overwhelming force of passion and renunciation. With uncanny emotional exactitude, Wickersham shows how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart, or in our own; how we continually try to explain others and to console ourselves; and how love, like storytelling, is ultimately a work of the imagination.

    This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the "The Possibility of Evil" and "The Summer People." In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There's something sinister in suburbia.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.