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  The Perfect Murder

  Stacy Aumonier

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  Stacy Aumonier was a British writer, best known for his outstanding short stories. Nobel Prize-winner John Galsworthy described Aumonier as "one of the best short story writers of all time" and predicted that he would "outlive all the writers of his day".Aumonier wrote over 85 short stories in his lifetime. He has been described as the "British Maupassant" owing to his captivating plots and his ability to create complex characters with just a few lines of carefully selected prose. His intensely visual prose meant his works were readily adaptable to the cinema screen, and several of his short stories were adapted by Alfred Hitchcock.The Perfect Murder tells the story of two brothers who are perpetually on the brink of financial ruin, but are unable to prise funds from trust fund left by their uncle until after the death of their aunt. The solution is to plan the perfect murder.The younger brother is confident that he can carry it out... and indeed, does so. With very unexpected results.

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  Pond Life and Other Stories

  Sam Kates

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  A deadly infatuation. Apocalypse. A haunted hotel. These are what you’ll meet if you dare to venture inside. 
  How would you react if you came across someone who claimed he caused the end of humankind? This is the question Jake must answer in The Third Coming, the story that spawned the Earth Haven trilogy. 
  Would you dive into a pond that will alter you fundamentally? What if you are on a beach at Dunkirk, already facing near-certain death, when you look into the eyes of true evil? Try to avoid the Obsessives’ Club—it’s not somewhere you want to stay. 
  Encounter a novel way of dealing with antisocial behaviour, a condemned prisoner who's convinced that she's Dorothy Gale, and a daring but brutal escape from a Siberian prison camp. Then there’s a girl who claims she can fly, not to mention a ghost, maybe two. 
  Ten stories of the macabre and the wondrous and the seemingly mundane . . . until you scratch beneath the surface.

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  Heathcliff Redux - A Novella and...

  Lily Tuck

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  The National Book Award winner explores the hidden dynamics of relationships with “lean, intriguing, formally inventive prose” in this collection (Kirkus Reviews). 
   
  A New York Times Editor’s Choice 
   
  In Heathcliff Redux, the novella that begins this collection, a married woman reads Wuthering Heights—just as she falls under the erotic and destructive spell of her own Heathcliff. In the stories that follow, a single photograph illuminates the intricate web of connections between friends at an Italian café; a forgotten act of violence in New York’s Carl Schurz Park returns to haunt the present; and a woman is prompted by a flurry of mysterious emails to recall her time as a member of the infamous Rajneesh cult. 
   
  With keen psychological insight and delicate restraint, Lily Tuck pries open the desires, doubts, and secret motives of her characters and exposes their vulnerabilities to the light. Sharp and unflinching, the novella and stories together form an exquisitely crafted collection.

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  The Withered Arm

  Thomas Hardy

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  Thomas Hardy's sinister tale of jealousy, unrequited love and a mysterious and hideous curse. When Farmer Lodge brings his new wife home, nobody is more resentful and yet curious about her than his spurned former lover, Rhoda Brooke. But a terrifying and supernatural nightmare in which the two women fight, leaves strange and sinister marks on the young wife's arm. Over the weeks and months that follow, the arm begins to wither and wrinkle. She seeks every possible cure, resorting in the end to consulting a mysterious conjurer. The remedy he proposes is too horrible to contemplate... and yet, the young woman feels she has no other choice...Gripping!

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  Shut Up You’re Pretty - Stories

  Téa Mutonji

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  Finalist, Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize; Finalist, Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
  		 
  In Téa Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed. 
  		 
  Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour. 
  		 
  Bespeak Audio Editions brings Canadian voices to the world with audiobook editions of some of the country’s greatest works of literature, performed by Canadian actors.

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  Frida or The Lover's Leap

  R.D. Blackmore

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  The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel.  But it is an art in itself. To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task.  Many try and many fail.   Blackmore was one to succeed as this audiobook ably demonstrates. 
   
  Richard Doddridge Blackmore was born on 7 June 1825 at Longworth in Berkshire (now part of Oxfordshire), where his father, John Blackmore, was Curate-in-charge of the parish. His mother died a few months after his birth the victim of an outbreak of typhus. With this loss, the family moved to Bushey, Hertfordshire, then on to their native Devon.  With much of his childhood spent in the lush and pastoral "Doone Country" of Exmoor, and along the Badgworthy Water, Blackmore came to love the very countryside he immortalised in Lorna Doone. In November 1853 he married his wife Lucy.  And the following year, 1854, his literary career began with a collection of Poems and for the next 15 years he would write in the winters and garden in the summers. 
   
  In 1860 with inherited money he built a house in Teddington just outside of London and established a market garden for the cultivation of fruit.  He loved horticulture but having little business experience could never really exploit it. In these short stories collected here, much of that countryside comes through to counterpoint the strong characters he creates. RD Blackmore died at Teddington on 20 January 1900 after a long and painful illness, and was buried next to his wife in Teddington cemetery.

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