Other books that might interest you

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  Mother of Wolves - A Dark...

  Ella Stone

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  A vampire Queen and a mad scientist set out to create an army of loyal guards, instead they unleash a primal fury unlike anything the world has ever seen. 
  Kidnapped, tortured and terrorised, Eve awaits her inevitable death with a fierce resilience. But little does she know that instead of death she will be reborn. However, she immediately finds herself and her kin in imminent danger of extinction before they even have a chance to venture into the world.  
  With the help of unlikely ally, can she save them before it is too late? 
  A standalone prequel for the Dark Creatures Saga.

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  Ripples

  Eva Seyler

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  Alice Rothmann has been content with her quiet, ordinary life in Oxford with her quiet, ordinary husband. But when he dies suddenly, she finds herself adrift and lonely, and before she knows it she's deeply attracted to her neighbour, George Graham.  
  There's only one hitch: George is married to Alice's best friend... 
  [Note to readers: While this is a standalone companion novella to The War in Our Hearts, this work does contain a major spoiler for The War in Our Hearts.]

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  A Thousand Deaths - From their...

  Jack London

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  John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876 in San Francisco.   
  His father, William Chaney, was living with Flora Wellman when she became pregnant.  Chaney insisted she have an abortion.  Flora's response was to turn a gun on herself.  Although her wounds were not severe the trauma made her temporarily deranged. 
  In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. 
  Jack worked hard at several jobs, sometimes 12-18 hours a day, but his dream was university.  He studied hard and borrowed the money to enrol in the summer of 1896 at the University of California in Berkeley. 
  In 1897, at 21, Jack searched out newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and for the name of his biological father. He wrote to Chaney, then living in Chicago, who claimed he could not be Jack’s father because he was impotent and casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men.  Jack, devastated by the response, quit Berkeley and went to the Klondike. Other accounts suggest that his dire finances presented Jack with the excuse he needed to leave. 
  In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing but also accumulated many health problems, including scurvy, which together with hip and leg problems he would carry for the rest of his life. 
  During the late 1890's Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full blown novels. 
  By 1904 Jack had married, fathered two children and was now in the process of divorcing.  A stint as a reporter on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was equal amounts trouble and experience. But that experience was always put to good use in a continuing and remarkable output of work. 
  In 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge who at last was a soul and companion who brought him some semblance of peace despite his advancing alcoholism and his incurable wanderlust. 
  Twelve years later Jack had amassed both wealth and a literary reputation through such classics as ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’ and many others. He had a reputation as a social activist and was a tireless friend of the workers.   
  Jack London died suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and uremia, aged only 40, on November 22nd 1916 at his property in Glen Elen in California.

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  Gooseberries - From their pens...

  Anton Chekhov

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  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia.  
  His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’.  
  At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remained and eked out a living by various means, including writing and selling short sketches to newspapers, to finish his schooling. That completed and with a scholarship to Moscow University obtained he rejoined his family. 
  He was able to help support them by selling satirical sketches and vignettes of Russian lifestyles and gradually obtained further commissions. In 1884, he qualified as a physician and, although it earned him little, he often treated the poor for free, he was fond of saying ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ 
  His own health was now an issue as he began to cough up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis.  Despite this his writing success enabled him to move the family into more comfortable accommodation.  
  Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’.  His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26.  
  He was also a major playwright beginning with the huge success of ‘Ivanov’ in 1887.   
  In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate north of Moscow. Here his medical skills and money helped the peasants tackle outbreaks of cholera and bouts of famine. He also built three schools, a fire station and a clinic.  It left him with less time for writing but the interactions with real people gained him detailed knowledge about the peasantry and their living conditions for his stories.  
  His most famous work, ‘The Seagull’ was received disastrously at its premiere in St Petersburg. It was later restaged in Moscow to highlight its psychological aspects and was a huge success. It led to ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’.  
  Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage in 1897 while visiting Moscow. A formal diagnosis confirmed tuberculosis and the doctors ordered changes to his lifestyle.  
  Despite a dread of weddings the elusive literary bachelor quietly married the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had met at rehearsals for ‘The Seagull’, on 25th May 1901. 
  By May 1904 with his tuberculosis worsening and death imminent he set off for the German town of Badenweiler writing cheerful, witty letters to his family and assuring them his health was improving.  
  On 15th July 1904 Anton Chekhov died at Badenweiler.  He was 44.

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  Beyond All Reasonable Doubt...

  Melissa Lozada-Oliva

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  From the author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria comes an ethereal and revelatory short story collection about faith, delusion, and the demons that can't get enough of us.A beheaded body interrupts a quinceañera. An obsession with her father's bizarre video game shifts a lonely girl's reality. A sentient tail sprouts from a hospital worker's backside, throwing her romantic life into peril. And in the novella "Community Hole," a recently cancelled musician flees New York and finds herself in a haunted punk house in Boston.This collection, at once playful, grisly, and tender, presents a tapestry of women ailing for something to believe in—even if it hurts them. Using body horror, fabulism, and humor, Melissa Lozada-Oliva mines the pain and uncanniness of the modern world. Reveling in the fine line between disgust and desire, Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! is for the sinner in us all.

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  The Artist

  Mai Redding

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  Leonard Vale, a brilliant painter, loses his hands in a devastating car crash, leaving him broken and adrift. Grief turns to obsession when a sinister presence, his own hands, begins haunting him. As the tapping at his window grows relentless, an insidious voice tempts him toward a horrifying solution. 
  Mai Redding, both the author and narrator of this chilling tale, is a storyteller fascinated by gothic fiction and the unexplained. With a keen eye for atmospheric horror, she weaves haunting narratives that blur the line between reality and legend. Her immersive storytelling draws readers into eerie worlds.

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