This debut collection of stories opens up the lives of characters whose worlds seethe with obsession and dark tension. Set in Ireland and the deep South of America, they reveal lives where dreams, memory and chance can lead to crippling effects.

Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and...

Story about the havoc wrought by inharmonious relationships in a middle-class English family.

With her children grown and her husband away in America for several months, Kate Brown finds herself alone for the first time in twenty years.

"Since her award-winning debut novel, Minaret, Leila Aboulela has been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, Aminatta Forna, and Anthony Marra among others for her rich and nuanced depictions of Islamic spiritual and political life. Her latest collection, Elsewhere, Home, draws us ineluctably into the lives of immigrants at home and abroad as they forge new identities and reshape old ones. A young woman's encounter with a former classmate elicits painful...

"A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence, make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for...

It's the spring of 1938, the threat of war looms across England, and widowed, slightly dizzy Sophie Braithwaite and her daughter Wynne await the arrival of a distant cousin, Franz von Heiden--from Nazi Germany no less. Franz turns out to be a stiff, formal young man whose father (unbeknownst to the Braithwaites) is a personal advisor to Hitler and has sent Franz to observe English attitudes, but they do indeed welcome him nicely. Soon nicknamed Frank,...

The main aim of detective stories is to entertain, but the best cast a light on human behaviour, and display both literary ambition and accomplishment. Even unpretentious detective stories, written for unashamedly commercial reasons, can give us clues to the past, and give us insight into a long-vanished world that, for all its imperfections, continues to fascinate. This book, written by award-winning crime writer and president of the Detection Club,...