As he stood up, he suddenly felt aroused by Mrs Shaw's large breasts, boy's haircut, and little-girl sneakers. Gopal wanted to put his hands on her waist and pull her toward him. But when his neighbour comes to borrow his lawnmower, Gopal thinks he might find something similar right here in New Jersey.

A family sets out on a road trip in the American South. . Flannery O'Connor's famous fifties story evokes heat and dust, family and feuding, God and grace - and is utterly uncompromising in its brutality.

'Thinking Betty was in the bath Graham was watching a late-night programme on Channel 4 called Footballers with Their Shirts Off when she unexpectedly came in on the trail of the hairdryer. "I didn't know you were interested in football," said Betty.' No one must ever find out that Graham is 'not the marrying sort'.

Adrienne is living in a puritanical age, when the best compliment a childless woman can get is: 'You'd make a terrific mother'. That's when she goes to her friends' Labor Day picnic and accidentally kills their baby. The shock of this scene is expertly packed into two brief paragraphs.

Three brothers travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog, the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take place, to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting the customs and rituals of the day, McGahern exquisitely traces how the brothers react to the area in unexpected and tender ways, and face their own feelings about the transience of life.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

Her story was this: she had been an orphan, her mother probably a whore. That's true of what brought her here too: was she IRA, or did she just take risks for the sake of a friend? Julia O'Faolain paints a portrait of young Irish girls and their unseverable connection, showing solidarity in places politics cannot reach.

Walking ahead of him on the heath, his wife turns to look at him over her shoulder, 'Topaz eyes glinting. Scorched face. Vixen.' In language harvested from nature, Sarah Hall tells a story of metamorphosis, of wildness and fecundity, and of a man reaching for reason, who cannot let go of the creature he loves.

Sonny Liston gave Kid Dynamite the slightest hint of a smile and winked. In the build-up to a fight, Kid Dynamite's head swirls - with thoughts of his estranged father, his difficult relationship with his stepfather, the time he met his hero, and the sense that his own life is reaching a moment of change.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

Brian Aldiss, who died in 2017, was best known for his science fiction - and in particular for a short story optioned by Stanley Kubrick, which would, under the direction of Steven Spielberg, become the film A.I. 'Sadness is just happiness in reverse,' says someone in a story within the story, 'We humans have to put up with it.'

Lips the colour of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like 'guilt, and guilt, and guilt': these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom. 'But what is the ninth kingdom?' she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage.

'On the whole, it was easier than I had expected. Only once did I feel myself at risk. Took her away from you some people might say. Didn't you feel any grievance?" I had been expecting this question. I knew exactly what I would say.' The late, great P. James takes us inside the mind of a murderer.

it is only a matter of time before she snaps. Edna O'Brien crafts a quietly horrifying scene of eroticism and insecurity, and makes one woman's near-fatal discomfort stand for society's larger trap.

In perhaps the most magnificent of what he called his 'strange stories', Robert Aickman blurs the lines between memory, premonition and the hallucinated life. Lene, a woman now recovering from the losses of the Second World War, recalls a gothic dolls' house of her childhood and the way in which its uncanny inhabitants entered her dreams.

The government has cleaned up Harare for the Queen of England's visit. 'The townships are too full of people, they said, gather them up and put them in the places the Queen will not see.' Four waves of people have settled on Easterly Farm since then, living on the margins in homes that will soon be destroyed. Among them is Martha Mupengo.

Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all. It is not. 'Dante and the Lobster' is the first of the linked short stories in Samuel Beckett's first book, More Pricks Than Kicks.

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go.

A collection that outlines the author's early preoccupation with issues of mental illness, creativity and femininity, all of which would become recurrent themes in her later work. It contains the thirteen stories together with five pieces of her journalism, as well as a further nine stories selected from the Indiana archive.

* This exquisite novel tells a love story with a difference. * 'One of my favourite classics' Carmen Callil

Set 300 years before the events in A Song of Ice and Fire, FIRE AND BLOOD is the definitive history of the Targaryens in Westeros as told by Archmaester Gyldayn, and chronicles the conquest that united the Seven Kingdoms under Targaryen rule through to the Dance of the Dragons: the Targaryen civil war that nearly ended their dynasty forever.

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. On road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight Judge Judy.