In 1914, in the canefields of northern New South Wales, the young men couldn't wait to set off for the adventure of war. The women coped as best as they could, raised the children, lived in fear of being the next to receive an official telegram. They grieved their dead, and came to learn that for returned men there are worse things than death in combat. They bore more children to replace those lost in the First World War, and the sons were just the right age to go off to the second. The Ghost at the Wedding is like no other account of war, chronicling events from both sides - the horror of the battlefields and the women who were left at home. Shirley Walker's depictions of those battles - Gallipoli, the Western Front, the Kokoda Track - are grittily accurate, their reverberations haunting. Written with the emotional power of a novel, here is a true story whose sorrow is redeemed by astonishing beauty and strength of spirit.

Now a Netflix Mandarin original drama! From the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Tiger, a Reese’s Book Club pick Yangsze Choo’s stunning debut, The Ghost Bride, is a startlingly original novel infused with Chinese folklore, romantic intrigue, and unexpected supernatural twists. Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has lost his fortune, and she has few suitors. Instead, the wealthy Lim family urges her to become a “ghost bride” for their son, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, a traditional ghost marriage is used to placate a restless spirit. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at what price? Night after night, Li Lan is drawn into the shadowy parallel world of the Chinese afterlife, where she must uncover the Lim family’s darkest secrets—and the truth about her own family. Reminiscent of Lisa See’s Peony in Love and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Ghost Bride is a wondrous coming-of-age story and from a remarkable new voice in fiction.

Fantasy.

At thirty-one, Kirsten has just returned to San Francisco from a bohemian year in Rome, ready to pursue a serious career as a writer and eventually, she hopes, marriage and family. When she meets Steve Beckwith, a handsome and successful attorney, she begins to see that future materialize more quickly than she’d dared to expect. Twenty-two years later, Steve has turned into someone quite different. Unemployed and addicted to opioids, he uses money and their two children to emotionally blackmail Kirsten. What’s more, he’s been having an affair with their real estate agent, who is also her close friend. So she divorces him—but after their divorce is finalized, Steve is diagnosed with colon cancer and dies within a year, leaving Kirsten with $1.5 million in debts she knew nothing about. It’s then that she finally understands: The man she’d married was a needy, addictive person who came wrapped in a shiny package. As she fights toward recovery, Kirsten begins to receive communications from Steve in the afterlife—which lead her on an unexpected path to forgiveness. The Ghost Marriage is her story of discovery—that life isn’t limited to the tangible reality we experience on this earth, and that our worst adversaries can become our greatest teachers.

Honouring strong new voices from around the world, the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a global award, open to unpublished as well as published writers, with a truly international judging panel. This global anthology presents the winner of the 2014 Short Story Prize, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s “Let’s Tell This Story Properly,” alongside some of the most promising and original stories entered for the prize during the past three years by emerging writers across the literary landscape of the world. Gathered from over ten thousand entries, the selected stories are provocative, rich in flair and ambition, and push the boundaries of fiction into fresh territory. The Ghost Marriage is by the United Kingdom’s Andrea Mullaney.

A thief, a saboteur, even a ghost—these are just a few of the uninvited guests turning multiple weddings into a weekend of mystery, mischief, and danger. Nancy needs quick answers, or the weddings could add up to one major disaster.

I'm not, at heart, a jumper; it's not my sort of thing . . . I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd go home, attend my sister's wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now of forever holding it.' It is the hottest June on record and the longest day of the year. Cassandra Edwards -tormented, intelligent, mordantly witty - leaves her graduate studies and her Berkeley flat to drive through the scorching heat to her family's ranch. There they are all assembled: her philosopher father, smelling sweetly of five-star Hennessy; her kind, fussy grandmother; her beloved, identical twin sister Judith, who is about to be married - unless Cassandra can help it.

Ghost stories, trickster tales, and other pieces of authentic Native American folklore are combined with Edward Curtis's haunting photographs.

Welcome to The Venue.. Where "discretion is our profession." Amy's ex-boyfriend has done quite well for himself. He's made a lot of money, he's found true love, and now, he's getting married at a secluded, high-end resort in the Alps. He wants to treat Amy (and all the other people he had a falling out with over the years) to a luxurious, all-expense-paid trip to his destination wedding. He, of course, has gotten over the break-up. He harbors no grudges. He just wants everyone to have a little fun. The newest release from the writer of INTERCEPTS and IN MY FATHER'S BASEMENT. REVIEWS: "TJ Payne delivers and is an author to watch." -- The Haunted Reading Room Reviews "Bloody, ridiculous fun" "Wow! Absolutely speechless! My heart is still racing!" "A wild, twisted, wicked ride that I want to go on again!" "If you enjoy books that are thrilling, interesting, unputdownable and that explore human nature ... then you HAVE GOT TO READ THIS!!"

Chief Inspector Li Yan and American pathologist Margaret Campbell, heroes of Peter May’s best-selling China thrillers, return in a new story. A girl has disappeared in Peking, and the mystery is somehow connected to a strange marital rite from China’s past: the Minghun, or Ghost Marriage. Winners of France’s Pix Intramuros in 2007, Peter May once again takes his readers on a powerful, fascinating exploration of modern China.