Fast Fiction

A wealthy Indian family’s journey to a mystic’s tomb reveals a tension between alms-giving and the uncomfortable reality of giving to the truly desperate and despised. Buying enlightenment is easy never easy, as this tragic tale reveals.

Originally published in the collection of the same name, Buying a Fishing Rod For My Grandfather blends the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the soft afterglow of memory and nostalgia, and will delight anyone who loved Gao's bestselling novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible.

Epic story telling and heroism unravel as a survivor of The Trojan War tells it as it really was. Was Helen a beauty, did the Greek fleet sink, was there really a war at all? Questions that provoke a brilliantly entertaining exploration of truth.

First published in Carol Shields’s acclaimed collection Dressing Up for the Carnival. A couple’s life is thrown into utter chaos when The National Association of Metereorologists go on strike – what will they wear? What will they eat?

Set in Detroit during the Depression, Doerr tells the affecting story of Tom, meant to die of a weak heart before he is 18, who is cossetted by his mother, but shown a world of possibilities by the flame-haired Ruby.

Capturing the toughness of young lives and love, this tale changes direction when a farm worker with a new family to feed loses his job , revealing a life-changing secret and his wasted talent in a world where he doesn’t fit.

Capturing the toughness of young lives and love, this tale changes direction when a farm worker with a new family to feed loses his job , revealing a life-changing secret and his wasted talent in a world where he doesn’t fit.

The Towers had gone and then they reappeared: five hundred thousand tonnes of exploded concrete and glass resurrected. Then they disappeared again, taking more people with them. A surreal, thought-provoking twist on mortality.

Originally published in the collection of short stories of the same name, in Faithless Joyce Carol Oates dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power as two adult sisters recall their mother’s disappearance when they were children.

Sailors on a cargo ship bound for Helsinki pick up a professor and his palm trees in Chile. The mystery of why the strange academic should want to take 200 trees back to his homeland becomes clear in a wickedly told tale of madness and liberation.

First published in Hilary Mantel’s collection of short stories Learning to Talk, in King Billy is a Gentleman a child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage.

An unnerving and hauntingly written tale about two young girls from markedly different backgrounds who share a terrifying secret one long, hot summer about the inhabitants of the local big house.