Item category 1: Short Stories

'After a Dance' is the compiled collection of short stories from acclaimed writer Bridget O'Connor, with an exclusive preface from the author's daughter, Constance Straughan.

When shadows grow longer, when expectation weighs heavy, how do people in Ireland mark Christmas? A woman shops for a very particular Christmas dinner: a man tries to buy a puppy for his daughter: a girl watches as her mother roasts a fowl over an open fire. From old traditions to the creation of...

Millions of readers around the world have relished Jeffrey Archer's short stories. Taking inspiration from his favourite short story writers - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maupassant, H.H. Munro, W. Somerset Maugham and O. Henry - Jeffrey Archer presents this sixth collection of stories.

The body cannot tell any lies. From birth to death, and through all the transitions in between, the body stores our knowledge and history, our feelings and experiences. Our betrayals. In these stories, an entomologist solves cold cases and upholds a sense of justice by studying the decay of cor...

Since its initial publication in 1978, 'The Stand' has been considered Stephen King's seminal masterpiece of apocalyptic fiction. It has sold millions of copies and has been adapted twice for television. Generations of writers have been impacted by its dark yet ultimately hopeful vision of the en...

A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine's bones. Bouquets are found all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect a human body. These are the stories of what happened next: a generation growing up in the aftermath of the Troubles, slowly coming t...

'Free Therapy' takes us into the inner lives of men and women who are versed in the language of therapy, possessed with the self-knowledge needed to change their lives, but finding themselves unwilling to doing it. As her characters try and fail to connect - via sex, friendship, screens and work ...

A gripping blend of the raw, the astonishing and the tragic, every story is as perfectly unexpected as a snare: tightly, exquisitely wound, ready to snap at a touch. Here, a young father is haunted by the consequences of a moment of distraction; tragedy is complicated by the inexplicable appearan...