Maxima Library

With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents’ home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together — to the seaside, perhaps.

The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

Lewis Sullivan, an RE teacher at a secondary school, is approaching retirement when he wonders for the first time whether he ought to have chosen a more dramatic career. He lives in a village in the Midlands, less than a mile from the house in which he grew up. He always imagined living by the sea. His grown-up daughter visits every day, bringing soup. He does not want soup. He frequents his second-favourite pub, where he can get half a shandy, a speciality sausage and a bit of company.

When an old friend appears on the scene, Lewis finds his routine and comfortable life shaken up.

An electrifying anthology of new horror stories by award-winning masters of the genre.

Twenty-one brand-new stories of the ominous and terrifying from some of the horror genre’s most talented writers. In ‘The Dead Thing’ Paul Tremblay draws us into the world of a neglected teenage girl and her younger brother and the evil that lurks at the heart of their family. In Gemma Files’ ‘Bulb’ a woman calls in to a podcast to tell the terrifying story of why she has escaped off-grid. And Rio Youers’ ‘The Typewriter’ tells in diary form of the havoc wreaked by a malevolent machine. Infinitely varied and beautifully told, New Fears 2 is an unmissable collection of horror fiction.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 Shortlisted for New Writer of the Year in the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards On the outer deck of a North Sea ferry stands Futh, a middle-aged and newly separated man, on his way to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. After an inexplicably hostile encounter with a hotel landlord, Futh sets out along the Rhine. As he contemplates an earlier trip to Germany and the things he has done in his life, he does not foresee the potentially devastating consequences of things not done. "The Lighthouse," Alison Moore's first novel, tells the tense, gripping story of a man trying to find himself, but becoming lost.

The Pre-War House and Other Stories is the debut collection from Alison Moore, whose first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Specsavers National Book Awards 2012.

The stories collected here range from her first published short story (which appeared in a small journal in 2000) to new and recently published work. In between, Moore’s stories have been shortlisted for more than a dozen different awards including the Bridport Prize, the Fish Prize, the Lightship Flash Fiction Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Nottingham Short Story Competition. The title story won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes