An American girl dreams of soccer and Mardi Gras while her Nigerian parents wait for their green cards; an organic seed distributor entraps an errant lover with a replica pre-Columbian Aztec artefact bought in Chicago; an instrument-gardener harvests the sound of a dead woman; a matchmaker faces failure unless she s prepared to offer herself; an English girl finds herself adrift in a Welsh summer camp; a blind beggar scrambles for change at a South American crossroads, and a Moroccan mother wonders if her son is really a saint. The stories in x-24 transcend location, nationality, reality and time; disconcerting at times for their sheer irreverence, each tale has that quality of rare insight that makes for compelling reading.
Loughborough Junction, summer 2013. A shopkeeper has gone missing and rumour is rife. What happened to him? Who has the motive and who the means to do him in? Has he been done in? And where will everyone get their fags, booze and lottery tickets without him? Local artist Beth Lamb sets out to investigate. But when you play detective in your own neighbourhood, things are bound to get complicated... Exquisite Corpse: Or, How Not to Kill Your Neighbours is Southbank Centre's first ever novel, written on Twitter by members of the public as part of the 2013 Festival of Neighbourhood. Curated by ten leading novelists - Stella Duffy, Alex Preston, Kamila Shamsie, Stuart Evers, Naomi Alderman, Vanessa Gebbie, Marcel Theroux, G Willow Wilson, Matt Haig and Joe Dunthorne - this unique publication brings together ideas of collaboration, participation and community... and is a thrilling read too!
Twelve wonderful tales of adventure, science, magic, monsters and time travel - featuring all twelve Doctors - are waiting for you in this very special Doctor Who book. And now they're joined by a very exciting, and very exclusive, new tale written by Naomi Alderman that will star the Thirteenth Doctor, as she battles to save the universe with her three close and trusted friends. Other authors featured are: Eoin Colfer, Michael Scott, Marcus Sedgwick, Philip Reeve, Patrick Ness, Richelle Mead, Malorie Blackman, Alex Scarrow, Charlie Higson, Derek Landy, Neil Gaiman, and Holly Black.
A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death *Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times , the Daily Mail , New Statesman , Esquire and the New European * Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.