Short Family

From "Studying with Stepdad" through to "No Longer at Ease", each short story contained within Dirty Stories fluidly takes you to a place and to encounters that you will ultimately find both stimulating and arousing. With 20 stories that follow a familiar thread of lust and desires - all going beyond what we normally expect to find in a collection such as this - Dirty Stories takes you deep into a world of sin and yearning that is as unique as it is compelling.

A Waterstones Best History Book 2025 ‘Learned, entertaining and highly approachable’ BOB MORTIMER ‘A treat’ ALICE LOXTON ‘Five stars from me…’ AL MURRAY An unmissable collaboration between two comedy legends – an irresistible, family-friendly deep dive into the murky lives of the...

It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and 15-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church - a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.

What goes better with mistletoe and merriment than the sweet beginnings of romance?

In three different loosely-related vignettes, Bradley Lewis uses a fictional narrative to present a glaring view of lives gone sour. Dissolution takes you to the darkest place in the lives of three different couples; two are married, and one young couple struggling with the idea of permanency. This tour de force will grab you from the first page and lead you down a path of circumstances that have gone horribly wrong. These addicting stories will send chills down the spine of anyone who has ever been married or in a relationship.

Zahara compone un relato a dos voces sobre la conciliación romántica y profesional de una generación en la que está mal visto enamorarse, en la que el trabajo es la prioridad y el desapego familiar la norma. Una sociedad en la que mantener una relación es tan difícil como sostener en pie un castillo de naipes.

A raw, crystalline debut poetry collection exploring themes of family, addiction, belonging, and loss—a searching elegy of the fissures that have come to define contemporary American life. The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate...

Way up in the highest, most private part of the forest, a small family of giant pandas made their home. This panda family loved to tell stories to each other. Sometimes the stories were true. Sometimes they weren't. That was part of the fun - guessing which stories were true and which weren't.

Todas las familias felices es la polifonía narrativa de los ramales conflictivos del México contemporáneo y, por extensión, de América Latina y del mundo. Violence is the name of the game.

Some stories are all about the crime. These stories are about the maelstrom of what happens afterward. A hard-bitten crew of professional thieves pull of the score of their lives, coming away with millions in cash, enough to change their lives, make new identities, start fresh. But that's when the real trouble begins. In this linked anthology, we follow each member of the crew of culprits after the heist and watch as this perfect score ends up a perfect nightmare.

In a moment of uncontrolled passion, Harvey Jones commits an act that triggers an avalanche of pain and suffering in the lives of those he loves. When he bargains with God for the life of his son, Harvey faithfully fulfills his side of the deal...but he's blindsided by betrayal when God doesn't. What will it take for him to open his heart and accept the gift of Grace he's offered?

Living under the shadow of two gifted parents, Astrid Nordling feels trapped everywhere but at the piano, finding solace in Schubert and Debussy. Her piano teacher is convinced that she is a prodigy; her mother is not so sure. Set in 1960s Chicago, this excerpt from Lisa Heiserman Perkins' upcoming novel shows that there can be such a thing as too much talent in a single family. As Astrid competes with her dramatic, high-strung mother for the spotlight, their tug-of-war threatens to pull the family apart.

Set in colonial New Zealand, The Aloe captures a moment of transition for the Burnell family as they move into a new home. At the heart of it all is Kezia, a perceptive young girl whose sharp eyes and quiet curiosity offer a child's view of adult tension, familial love, and the quiet dramas of everyday life. Through lush, lyrical prose, Mansfield explores the unspoken complexities of women's roles, family expectations, and inner longing—all from the inside out.

A "novel in stories" by Jen Knox, winner of the Prize Americana for Prose.

This is the audio program to play at home over Christmas or during the car journey to see relatives. Dylan Thomas, "The Little Match Girl," and "The Nutcracker" are read by Jenny Agutter with accompanying Tchaikovsky's music - this is a must for Christmas. It contains new recordings as well as some of the finest tracks from the Naxos AudioBooks catalogue.

Gary has heard some interesting tales about members of his family, so he decides to try and record some of them for posterity's sake. He interviews his great grandmother who has told him the story many times about how she survived the sinking of the Titanic, a distant uncle who may have witnessed the second coming, and, finally, a very rich uncle who maybe got that way thanks to time travel.

From the renowned creator of The Electric State and Tales from the Loop, Stålenhag returns with his long-awaited new work of retro-futuristic dystopia within the mysterious zone of an abandoned Swedish military facility. Beginning in 2024, yet set largely during the early 2000s, Sunset at Zero...

Catorce autoras, seleccionadas por Laura Freixas, con relatos sobre un tema poco frecuentado en la literatura, algunos escritos especialmente para esta antología: Rosa Chacel, Carmen Laforet, Carmen Martín Gaite, Ana María Matute, Josefina Aldecoa, Esther Tusquets, Cristina Peri Rossi, Ana María Moix, Soledad Puértolas, Clara Sánchez, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Mercedes Soriano, Almudena Grandes y Luisa Castro.

In Raised by Unicorns: Stories from People with LGBTQ+ Parents, Frank Lowe has carefully edited an anthology that reflects on the upbringing of children in many different forms of LGBTQ+ families. From Baby Boomers to Generation Z, it features diverse stories that express the distinctiveness of this shared journey and of each particular family. It's visceral, raw, and not always pretty, but love is always the common thread.

In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer. What must have it like to be them? We share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We hear of what happened to them, and to their Chinese neighbours caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow a young woman's search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities.