Larry MacCabe is a retired academic, a widower, and until a chance meeting with the administrator of a care home, also friendless. At her suggestion, he adopts a Basset Hound and joins her one Saturday at the local park. He becomes a regular visitor, and for the first time in his life the member of a gang. While his new companions…
I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo is Nik Cohn’s hymn to rock as myth, in all its crazed, absurd and glorious excess. Partly based on the legendary rocker, P J Proby, Johnny Angelo is the pop star to end all pop stars – narcissistic, mock-heroic and massively destructive. The novel follows his progress from warped…
It’s the oldest story in the world: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. But when the boy is Nick Sharman, and the girl has a violent ex-jailbird as an old boyfriend, who promises extreme retribution on anyone who gets involved with her, it’s never going to be that simple….
The human head remains in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at a rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by this, Robert Olen Butler wrote Severance, sixty-two vignettes each exactly 240 words in length, that capture the flow of thoughts that go…
Robert Olen Butler’s lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. A contemporary classic by one of America’s most important living writers, this edition of A Good Scent from a…
After an absence of some seven years, Greg Bowman returns from America to find his father lying in a bamboo coffin, his estranged brother Billy stalking a woman with no feet and his seventy-nine-year-old Uncle Frank planning to rob a bank……
Nancy Skidmore has Alzheimer’s and her oldest friend Eugene Chaney III once more a purpose in life – to end hers. When the moment for Gene to take Nancy to her desired death in Coffeeville arrives, she is unexpectedly admitted to the secure unit of a nursing home and he has to call upon his two remaining friends to help break her out…
Boston PI Spenser returns – heading west to the rich man’s haven of Potshot, Arizona, a former mining town reborn as a paradise for Los Angeles millionaires looking for a place to escape the pressures of their high-flying lifestyles. Potshot overcame its rough reputation as a rendezvous for old-time mountain men who lived off the land,…
From Cocaine, that most troubling and fascinating of substances; through Speed, an oft demonized and misunderstood drug and on to Heroin, long seen as the most ‘literary’ of narcotics – the contributors to this all-new original anthology reveal that those who partake are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep….
Marijuana is the everyman drug. Teenagers surreptitiously toke on it, politicians refuse to inhale it, even your mum and dad have had a go. Marijuana is a mellow, let’s put on a Barry Manilow CD, open a bottle of vino, and order a pizza drug. It’s the easy drug. The no howling at the moon drug. No shooting up and losing your job….
That most “literary” of narcotics – the enigmatic opium poppy and its various derivatives – and as these stories reveal, those who partake of the sacred flower are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep: overdose, hepatitis C, degradation and self-destruction….
Conman is the story of young Neil Martin, a kindly family man. A bit geeky, a bit nerdy. If you met him, you would assume he runs a failing comic memorabilia store in London’s Soho. Which he does. In order to bail himself out of a huge stock-ruining, poster sopping basement flood, he needs to claim on his insurance. Which he…