Other books that might interest you

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  Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories

  Christopher Burns

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  With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such as a repository of unstable nitrate film, a desert outcrop where a daughter vanished, a winter barn in which a silent refugee works without explanation, and a Parisian suicide that echoes down far more than a century.
  In these stories, landscape itself can be a determinant, as essential to the narrative as the characters that walk into a draining reservoir, a Neolithic cave, or a remote Greek church. For these are driven people – haunted or determined, alert or unaware, lovers or doubters, saviours or perpetrators.
  Several of these stories have previously appeared in publications as diverse as Les Temps Modernes, Granta Shorts, Best British Short Stories, The Time Out Book of New York Stories and Prospect.
  Christopher Burns' work has been praised by Kazuo Ishiguro, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel and others. He is the author of six novels, including The Flint Bed (shortlisted for the Whitbread award), The Condition if Ice, A Division of the Light, and an earlier collection of short stories, About The Body. He lives in Cumbria.
  This is a wholly distinctive, ambitious and challenging collection that can be read again and again.

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  Souvenirs from Another Life -...

  Leah Browning

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  Souvenirs from Another Life, the first full-length collection of short fiction by Leah Browning, features an abundant selection of stories. Relationships are at the forefront: those between friends, siblings, partners, or parents and children, as well as the more tangential relationships between neighbors or coworkers. By turns sharp and tender, the stories delve into the reality and surreality of love, companionship, and family.  
  In “Caught,” a man finds his Tinder date surrounded by vaguely threatening birds. Toward the beginning of “The Surrogate Wife,” a woman returns after a long journey to discover that her husband’s new housekeeper has taken over her home. And in “The Costume Wedding,” a doctor and her boyfriend travel to Albuquerque to attend a front yard ceremony where they’ve been instructed to dress up. 
  Slippery and hypnotic, these short stories illuminate hidden corners of courtship, marriage, divorce, friendship, and familial devotion. Souvenirs from Another Life includes full-length literary fiction, flash, microfiction, and linked stories about the pleasures and absurdities of everyday life.

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  The Shades of Spring

  D H Lawrence

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  'The Shades of Spring'. In this story the hero has moved on in the world and is married yet cannot forget his old love. He retraces the steps to her farm hoping for what? He finds his old love attached to a physical young man who can give the girl what he could not - pure physical love - and this she prefers to his more intellectual love.

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  The Middle Toe of the Right Foot

  Ambrose Bierce

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  Title: The Middle Toe of the Right Foot 
  Author: Ambrose Bierce 
  Narrator: Amazon bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne 
  Original Publication: 1890 
  Public Domain: Yes 
  Series Placement: Number 53 in the Timeless Terrors series 
  Description: 
  In The Middle Toe of the Right Foot, Ambrose Bierce delivers a chilling tale of guilt, vengeance, and the lingering echoes of past violence. The story follows Manton, pressured into spending the night in the abandoned Odell house—the site of a brutal murder for which he was once accused. What begins as a cruel dare soon becomes a confrontation with forces more relentless than the men who seek to humiliate him. 
  Alone in the decaying structure, Manton becomes aware of a silent presence watching from the darkness. When his tormentors return at dawn, they find him dead from terror, and eerie footprints in the dust reveal that he was not alone. The chilling pattern exposes the truth behind the crime, the victims, and the supernatural justice that finally found him. 
  With his trademark blend of irony and psychological dread, Bierce transforms a tale of cruelty and guilt into a haunting exploration of retribution. 
  Narrated by Amazon bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance captures the story’s mounting tension and stark, ghostly imagery, bringing Bierce’s distinct American Gothic style to life. While the text is in the public domain, this narration is an original performance and copyright © 2025 Jonathan Dunne. 
  As the fifty-third entry in Timeless Terrors, The Middle Toe of the Right Foot remains one of Bierce’s most striking examinations of fear, justice, and the shadows a crime can cast long after death.

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  The Wife of His Youth

  Charles W. Chesnutt

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  "The Wife of His Youth" is a short story by American author Charles W. Chesnutt, first published in July 1898. It later served as the title story of the collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line. That book was first published in 1899, the same year Chesnutt published his short story collection The Conjure Woman.
  "The Wife of His Youth" features an upwardly mobile, light-skinned mulatto man who is a respected member of the Blue Veins Society in a Midwestern city. He is preparing to marry another light-skinned mulatto woman when a much darker woman comes to him seeking her husband, whom she has not seen in 25 years. The story, which was met positively upon its publication, has become Chesnutt's most anthologized work.

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  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  Mark Twain

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  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (also simply known as Tom Sawyer) is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Tom Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime. Though overshadowed by its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature. It was one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter.

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