She's the one growing up in the mad family, in the mad society, who doesn't want to know what's going on. But things are going on: eight-year-olds collecting very peculiar treasure; babies who might be, or might not be, bombs; schoolgirls bringing guns into schoolyards; and, of course, lots of food and bad, bad sex.If Amelia is to live she needs to change. Can she, though, in a place where people don't know how to look after themselves, and so wouldn't know how to look after one another?The shattering and darkly funny debut novel from the author of Milkman, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

    Its setting is Blindefellows, a second rate public school in the West Country, founded as a charity school for poor, blind boys, but long since converted into an ‘elite’ educational institution for anyone who can pay.The novel runs chronologically from 1974 to 2014. In the first story ‘The Fair Filles of France’ we see the arrival of Sedgewick who starts his first teaching job at Blindefellows after an unsuccessful stint in shoe sales. Japes, who has been at Blindefellows for a few years following a career in the Royal Engineers, senses the younger man’s inexperience and determines to help remedy it by taking him on the school’s annual World Wars trip to France. Once they arrive in Bayeux, it quickly becomes apparent that the trip is a means for Japes to cavort with one of his many girlfriends.Throughout the novel, Japes, an older chap, regularly attempts to imbue the younger Sedgewick with his worldly experience and takes it upon himself to introduce Sedgewick to womankind as a means of giving the naïve fellow some sort of fulfilling experience in life. He’s repeatedly thwarted by the timorous Sedgewick, however, who throws his energies into his love of History as a means of sating his rather watery appetite. An unlikely hero through and through, Sedgewick repeatedly finds himself driven to save the day, such as in the next story, ‘The Guardians of The Flock’ where Sedgewick tries to diffuse a siege and is himself taken hostage.In ‘Of Art and Cheese’, out of necessity, Sedgewick thrusts himself into the role of entrepreneur. Blindefellows’ loathsome Librarian, Francis Fairchild, proposes that the strapped for cash school do away with The Flock, the school’s mascot. Sedgewick comes up with a plan to make them pay their way by establishing a creamery which he will attempt to run, much to the ridicule of the others who hear he needs to read a book on dairy farming to learn how to milk a teat.In the fourth story it is 1984, the year of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the school, and English master, Tony Tree, bombastic descendant of Beerbohm Tree, has penned ‘A Blindefellows Chronicle’, a multi-media extravaganza to mark the great day, with Sedgewick dubiously in charge on the technical front. Meanwhile, Japes, who has been given responsibility for the social side of the event to distract him from his mid-life crisis, gets entangled in twin flings with the caterer and decorator he has hired, whom he unsuccessfully tries to keep out of sight of one another.Later, Sedgewick finds himself in a predicament after inadvertently sputtering what is taken to be a proposal by the school’s dowdy receptionist, Yvonne. Advised by Japes to wriggle out of it, Sedgewick tries to pluck up the courage to do the deed. Her ramshackle family farm and her frightening father urge him on until he is touched by the way Yvonne tends to an abused donkey. From that point, he finds himself unable to act on his cold feet and marriage is on the cards.Other members of the school’s bachelor community feature in the form of Toby and Les, Japes’ colleagues in the Science department. In ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’, Japes and Toby attempt to cure Les, their lab technician, of his imaginary allergies with near disastrous consequences. ‘Toby and the Tree People’ is the story that follows, set in 1989, the year of the White Paper, ‘Roads for Prosperity’. Nature-loving Toby attempts to block the razing of a favourite patch of woodland by inhabiting a tree. The Tree People of the title are a gaggle of itinerant protesters who turn up to help him, but who prove exceedingly trying.Bachelorettes are key elements too with the landmark arrival of the first female Head of Department half way through the novel in 1994 in “The Fraulein from Brazil”. Matron Ridgeway, Japes’ female equivalent in philandering, is the clear-headed Tiresias of the novel who has to go through her own baptism of fire in chapter two when she starts work at the male-dominated Blindefellows as the school nurse.

    PoeAda Concannon’s first day in America is a success. She’s the new maid for the respected but eccentric Dickinson family of Amherst, Massachusetts. Despite the differences in age and class, eighteen-year-old Ada, “a neat little Irish person, fresh off the boat,” strikes up a deep freindship with Miss Emily, the gifted elder daughter living a spinster’s life at home. Emily is a bastion of support as Ada struggles to find her place in this new world, while Ada’s toil gives Emily the freedom she needs to write.But Emily’s passion for words begins to dominate her life. She decides to wear nothing but white and increasingly avoids the outside world. When Ada’s safety and reputation are threatened, however, Emily faces down her own demons in order to help her friend, with shocking consequences.

    Features stories by Neil Gaiman, Melissa Marr, Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Garth Nix, and many more.

    Meet Tuck Budd, who is happy living in Manhattan with her two moms, Izzy and Anastasia, until she begins to wonder who her father is. Meet La, who faces the loss of her mother with an imaginary androgynous blue friend who lives in her closet. Zingingly bright and dreamily dark, full of wonder and gritty reality, these stories by acclaimed author Francesca Lia Block show the reader that in every girl there truly is a goddess.The cutting-edge author of Weetzie Bat once again breaks new ground with Girl Goddess #9, nine stories about girl goddesses of every age and shape and color and size, wearing combat boots and spiky hair or dressed all in white. One girl has two moms, another has no mother at all but a strange blue skinned creature that lives in her closet. One is a rock star groupie, another loves dancing and reading poetry and having picnics in the backyard when the moon is full. These are stories about girls discovering that the world is not a simple place and that there is more than one way to live'all in Ms. Block's rich, lyrical language that fans have come to adore and that Sassy magazine called ‘a dream.'

    This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiancé on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.

    She is a sheltered college student, he an adventurous, charismatic young artist. In a city brimming with possibilities, he spurs her to take life on with gusto. But as Catherine opens herself to new experiences, James's life becomes a prison; as changed as the new Ireland may be, it is still not a place in which he feels able to truly be himself. Catherine, grateful to James and worried for him, desperately wants to help -- but as time moves on, and as life begins to take the friends in different directions, she discovers that there is a perilously fine line between helping someone and hurting them further. When crisis hits, Catherine finds herself at the mercy of feelings she cannot control, leading her to jeopardize all she holds dear.By turns exhilarating and devastating, Tender is a dazzling exploration of human relationships, of the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we are taught to tell. It is the story of first love and lost innocence, of discovery and betrayal. A tense high-wire act with keen psychological insights, this daring novel confirms McKeon as a major voice in contemporary fiction, belonging alongside the masterful Edna O'Brien and Anne Enright.

    When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women -- her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

    It’s how so many of our most beloved stories start.Fairy tales have dominated our cultural imagination for centuries. From the Brothers Grimm to the Countess d’Aulnoy, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Anderson, storytellers have crafted all sorts of tales that have always found a place in our hearts.Now a new generation of storytellers have taken up the mantle that the masters created and shaped their stories into something startling and electrifying.Packed with award-winning authors, this anthology explores an array of fairy tales in startling and innovative ways, in genres and settings both traditional and unusual, including science fiction, western, and post-apocalyptic as well as traditional fantasy and contemporary horror.From the woods to the stars, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales takes readers on a journey at once unexpected and familiar, as a diverse group of writers explore some of our most beloved tales in new ways across genres and styles.

    Stories of Ourselves is a set text for the Cambridge Literature in English courses at IGCSE, O Level, AS and A Level. The anthology contains stories by writers from many different countries and cultures.

    This collection announces a major new voice in literary fiction for the twenty-first century.

    Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

     Chuck Nielson hung up his six shooter and retired from the Texas Rangers ten years ago, at one time the fastest draw west of the Mississippi. He loves two things, his wife and his ranch. Now the Sunset Kid is in town. He’s killed seven men—all seven died with the sun in their eyes. Chuck is number eight and the Kid has sent word for him to be in the town street at sunset. If Chuck meets the Kid, he risks everything; if he stays home he loses his self-respect, and the Kid goes on killing. This is a short story by Donald L. Robertson, the author of Logan’s Word: A Logan Family Western - Book 1.

    The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, is the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers - three of them are charged with manslaughter - and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.

    Daly, Christina Marsden Gillis, Don Moser, Tom Quirk, B. Ruby Rich, R.J.R. Rockwood, Larry Rubin, Gretchen Schulz, Marie Mitchell Oleson Urbanski, Joyce M. Wegs, Marilyn C. Wesley, and Joan D. Winslow.