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  Bittersweet Moments

  Kimberly Thomas

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  Jules needed a fresh start, that's why she moved halfway across the world to attend college in Seoul. What she didn't need was to get pregnant. Being pregnant was not part of the plan, neither was finding her Prince Charming. But when her happily ever after turns out not to be who he says he is, Jules is left heartbroken and jaded. Left with no one else to turn to but her mother, Cora, Jules finds herself heading back to the US to the coastal town of Oak Harbor. She's dreading the looks of disappointments and questions that she knows will be waiting for her. When her ex shows up unannounced, she receives new and shocking information that makes her question everything. 
   
   
   
  Cora is also struggling to accept that she is about to lose another parent in such a short period of time along with her youngest daughter being pregnant and secretive about who the father is. Why is all of this happening now? She was just settling into her new life after a nasty divorce—still it seems the fates are not through with her yet. Her doubts put her relationship with Jamie to the test and she calls for a pause to deal with her family problems. 
   
   
   
  Will Cora and Jules be able to resolve their issues? Will Cora come to accept losing the woman that she has loved so much and give in to love without hesitation? Will Jules get her happily ever after?

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  A Complete Recovery - From their...

  Barry Pain

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  Barry Eric Odell Pain was born at 3 Sydney Street in Cambridge on 28th September 1864. He was one of 4 children. 
  He was educated at Sedbergh School and then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 
  In 1889, Cornhill Magazine published his short story ‘The Hundred Gates’.  This opened the way for Pain to advance his literary career on several fronts. He became a contributor to Punch and The Speaker, as well as joining the staff of both the Daily Chronicle and Black and White.  
  Pain was also a noted and prominent contributor to The Granta and from 1896 to 1928 a regular contributor to the Windsor Magazine. 
  It is often said that Pain was discovered by Robert Louis Stevenson, who compared his work to that of Guy de Maupassant.  It’s an apt comparison. Pain was a master of disturbing prose but was also able to inject parody and light comedy into many of his works.  A simple premise could in his hands suddenly expand into a world very real but somehow emotionally fraught and on the very edge of darkness. 
  Barry Pain died on 5th May 1928 in Bushey, Hertfordshire.

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  Bush Meat

  Mandy Sutter

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  For Sarah's family, memories of early Sixties Aba in south-eastern Nigeria are scorched onto their hearts. A days-old burial mound exposed as an 'exploded diagram' of bones picked clean by beasts. Adaku the Barbary duck with a 'melted face', who was conscripted into friendship by six-year-old Sarah in the first of a lifetime's unlikely alliances, forged by necessity and relocation. The narcotic puff let out from the freezer in the meat-man's shack off the Ikot Ekpene road, where Maureen, Sarah's lonely mother, gave up aspirations to be a 'proper oil company wife' to Jim, and risked buying 'bush meat'. The dry 'snakeskin' bark of the old iroko tree on the bend of the town's river, under whose shade Jim sought sanctuary from people, and whose 'two long white catkins the tree one day bestowed onto his head like confetti.'
  Back home, Jim swaps adventure and agency for woodwork and more whisky. Maureen, denying her love of Igbo crafts and cloth, considers reinventing herself as an Oxfam shop assistant. In the days before her grandmother's funeral, Sarah finds the platitudes of her father evasive compared to the wisdom and ritual taught by servant Chidike while burying the household monkey. Sarah's hard-won Nigerian barter goods, a silver thumb-ring and a dare taken to eat fried-fat market 'snack', become devalued. At Aba's Sancta Maria, unaccustomed food was a cone of hot roast groundnuts paid for by a penny with a hole. In Britain, 'unaccustomed' means milk with a 'thickened band of yellow'. Now, the currency is a dare Sarah first honours, then refuses.
  As people of that time and place are scattered like those bleached bones, Aba acts as centripetal force on their imagination. Today's city was a small town the like of which Tim Winton gnaws at from different angles in The Turning. Mandy Sutter's approach is similarly innovative. Her themes are substitution, racism, and whether the spirit can ever survive transaction.

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  The Upper Berth

  F. Marion Crawford

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  Title: The Upper Berth 
  Author: F. Marion Crawford 
  Narrator: Jonathan Dunne 
  Original Publication: 1886 
  Public Domain: Yes 
  Series Placement: Number 31 in the Timeless Terrors series 
  Description: 
  The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford is one of the most chilling ghost stories ever set upon the sea — a tale of isolation, disbelief, and a horror that defies explanation. A seasoned traveler boards an Atlantic steamer and takes lodging in a cabin known for its peculiar reputation. When strange noises, cold drafts, and unexplainable presences begin to disturb the night, curiosity turns to terror — and the truth behind the “upper berth” is revealed in a climax of pure dread. 
  Crawford’s mastery lies in his restrained realism and his ability to build unbearable tension from the ordinary. What begins as a skeptical sailor’s anecdote becomes a haunting confrontation with something that refuses to stay beneath the waves. 
  Narrated by Amazon bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance channels the claustrophobic suspense and mounting fear of Crawford’s maritime masterpiece. While the text itself is in the public domain, this narration is an original performance and copyright © 2025 Jonathan Dunne. 
  Part of Timeless Terrors, a series devoted to resurrecting the dark legends of classic horror, The Upper Berth remains a cornerstone of the ghost story tradition — a tale where disbelief drowns in the face of the uncanny. 
  Prepare for a voyage into the unknown — where the sea is not the only thing that stirs at night, and the upper berth waits for its next occupant.

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  Death in the Woods - From their...

  Sherwood Anderson

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  Sherwood Anderson was born on 13th September 1876 in Camden, Ohio. 
  When his father’s business failed the family was forced to move on a regular basis before finally settling in Clyde, Ohio.   
  Anderson, one of 7 children, left school at 14 to take a number of jobs to help with the family finances. These were difficult years. 
  He moved to Chicago in search of opportunities before joining the Army for the US-Spanish War of 1898.  He then entered Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio to complete his education before moving back to Chicago to take up a writing job. 
  In 1904 he married Cornelia Lane, her family had resources and Anderson was keen, with this family backing, to run a business. 
  The early years of their marriage produced 3 children but a nervous breakdown in 1907 and another in 1912, despite his success as a business entrepreneur, resulted in him abandoning his family and deciding that a literary career would be best for him.   
  A move back to Chicago resulted in a job in advertising, a divorce from Cornelia and marriage to Tennessee Mitchell.  
  That same year his first book ‘Windy McPherson’s Son’ was released and in 1919, his most famous book, ‘Winesburg, Ohio’, a collection of short stories about life in an Ohio town was released. 
  Anderson continued to write short stories, novels and non-fiction but his only true bestseller came with ‘Dark Laughter’.  His influence on writers that followed, from Faulkner to Hemingway, was immense. He also married a further two times.   
  Sherwood Anderson died in in Colón, Panama, on the 8th March, 1941. He was 64. An autopsy revealed that a swallowed toothpick had resulted in peritonitis. 
  His headstone epitaph reads ‘Life, Not Death is the Great Adventure.’

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  The Top 10 Short Stories – The...

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  In these Isles of Imperial Empire the English language is now the lingua franca of the globe.  But between the Home nations tensions remain, they rise and fall, all is not well.  Authors born abroad and returning have new views, unique, a little off-kilter and literature feeds well on this fuel.  Together the men of these islands produce literature of quite sumptuous quality. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 - The British & Irish Men - The 19th Century - An Introduction 
  2 - The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  3 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens 
  4 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  5 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 1 by Oscar Wilde 
  6 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 2 by Oscar Wilde 
  7 - The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling 
  8 - The Dream Woman by Wilkie Collins 
  9 - The Story of B24 by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  10 - The Inconsiderate Waiter by J M Barrie 
  11 - Lost Hearts by M R James 
  12 - Youth - Part 1 by Joseph Conrad 
  13 - Youth - Part 2 by Joseph Conrad

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