Eight stories by one of Japan's most important women authors concern the struggles of women in a repressive society. An unwed mother introduces her children to their father . . . A woman confronts the "other woman". . . A young single mother resents her children . . . These stories touch on universal themes of passion and jealousy, motherhood's joys and sorrows, and the tug-of-war between responsibility and entrapment.

Entering the SAS after serving with the Royal Green Jackets, Gaz Hunter was following a family tradition. His missions have ranged from extracting hostages in Sierra Leone to counter-terrorist operations in Northern Ireland - and he has always led from the front. A former senior NCO of the SAS, Hunter is the highest-ranking member of the regiment to tell his story yet.

San Francisco’s art world is exhibiting murderous tendencies… Geez, make a splash in the world of art forgery at the age of seventeen and people can’t stop bringing it up. Lesson learned: genuine art is priceless, and forgery gets you arrested. Now Annie puts her artistic talents to honest use as a faux finisher in San Francisco. But carving out a new reputation can be a creative challenge… Modernism isn’t Annie’s thing, but even she is surprised to discover that the “sculpture” in a prestigious gallery’s grisly new exhibition is an all-too-real corpse—the artist’s. Meanwhile, a Chagall painting is stolen from the Brock Museum, and Annie’s old friend Bryan is accused of being in on the fix. To track down the missing Chagall, she’ll need the dubious assistance of a certain sexy art thief. And if Michael—or whatever his real name may be—isn’t distraction enough, Annie’s mother shows up in town, acting strangely. Annie’s got to solve these mysteries, and fast—because art is long, but life can be very, very short.

With time running out, Dewey Andreas is the last hope for a kidnap victim. The US Vice President has a problem. Her son, off in college, doesn't care for his security detail. So when Spring Break comes around, he slips away from his bodyguard, picks up his best friend, and heads to Mexico. But, at the airport, he’s kidnapped. If an exorbitant ransom isn’t paid in hours, he’ll be killed. Dewey Andreas, CIA operative and former Delta, happens to be in Mexico, taking some time off. Now he’s in a race against the clock, with a highly-trained group of vicious men waiting at the other end. An original Dewey Andreas short by New York Times bestseller Ben Coes, perfect for fans of Mark Greaney, Kyle Mills and Brad Thor.

The novel A Brief Excursion anchors this collection of fiction by one of the most significant postwar Croatian writers. This novel and six stories, including many from Soljan's first book, Traitors, reveal a sensibility both comic and poignant, devoted to questions of identity and solidarity, of how the one and the many conflict and intermingle-issues that were at the center of both political and literary life for Soljan. Whether fixing up a summerhouse on the Istrian coast or confronting prejudice and the past in a tourist town, Soljan's characters are stirred to action by an undefined longing, only to find the stark landscape of self-knowledge and loss.

In the eight years since his first full-length novel Gridlinked was published by Pan Macmillan, Neal Asher has firmly established himself as one of the leading British writers of Science Fiction, and his novels are now translated in many languages. Most of his stories are set in a galactic future-scape called ‘The Polity’, and with this collection of marvellously inventive and action-packed short stories, he takes us further into the manifold diversities of that amazing universe. No one does monsters better than Neal Asher, so be prepared to revisit the lives and lifestyles of such favourites as the gabbleduck and the hooder, to savour alien poisons, the walking dead, the Sea of Death, and the putrefactor symbiont.

This edition of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s collection of short stories—which includes “Hook,” Clark’s most renowned story—makes these pieces available again to a new generation of readers. Critic John R. Milton once said that Walter Van Tilburg Clark "did perhaps more than anyone else to define (in his fiction) the mode of perception, the acquisition of knowledge, and the style which we tend to call Western." In 1950, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the acclaimed novel The Ox-Bow Incident, published a collection of short stories that had already won distinction in various national magazines. The collection was well received by reviewers, and subsequent critics have noted that these stories reflect both Clark’s literary power and the major concerns of his novels: the interior and intuitive complexities of good and evil, and the fragile, intricate web that connects humankind to the rest of the natural world. A foreword by Ann Ronald, one of the West’s most astute literary critics, sets the stories into the context of Clark’s oeuvre and illuminates the way they reveal crucial characteristics of this writer’s imagination.

Fire in the Night is a novella-length tale of four National Guardsmen, lost, soaked, and freezing, who stumble upon an abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere-- a sanctuary which fulfills their every need. Parker, the reluctant leader who is suffering from PTSD, discovers the cabin’s owner is a recently killed street preacher named John J. Monk. Parker soon realizes Monk’s death in front of hundreds of witnesses sparked the civil rebellion that has engulfed him. Parker investigates Monk’s death by examining the cabin and probing the memories of his fellow soldiers. He can almost feel Monk’s presence. That night, Monk’s spirit invades his dreams and fills him with memories not his own. Parker experiences an epiphany which changes him forever. May Eleventh is a memoir about returning from Vietnam during the height of that war, and finding a society as divided and dangerous as the war itself. In between these two stories are memoirs, fables, and fantasies which attempt to reveal the universal truths and powerful magic hidden in our everyday lives.