Showing results by author "Sarah Moss" in All Categories

Homeless Bodies and Other Stories is an original fiction podcast featuring audio-exclusive short stories from award-winning authors and Sunday Times best-sellers, inspired by objects & artefacts from Wellcome Collection’s permanent exhibition, 'Medicine Man', in London. Exploring themes of otherness, humanity, history, society and belief, Homeless Bodies and Other Stories brings together a gripping collection of tales that are unsettlingly eerie and provokingly current.

They rarely speak to each other, but they take notice - watching from the safety of their cabins, peering into the half-lit drizzle of a Scottish summer day, making judgments from what little they know of their temporary neighbors. On the longest day of the year, the hours pass nearly imperceptibly as 12 people go from being strangers to bystanders to allies, their attention forced into action as tragedy sneaks into their lives.

In the North of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of its own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?   

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house.

A poignant, funny and engrossing exploration of family life centred around a cataclysmic event and its aftermath, from the author of Night Waking and Signs for Lost Children. Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man, and he is happy. But one day he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that for no apparent reason, 15-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing.

Ally is intelligent, studious and engaged in an eternal battle to gain her mother’s approval and affection. Her mother is a religious zealot, keener on feeding the poor and saving prostitutes than on embracing the challenges of motherhood. Even when Ally is accepted as one of the first female students to read medicine in London, it still doesn’t seem good enough. The first in a two-book sequence, Bodies of Light is a poignant tale of a psychologically tumultuous 19th-century upbringing set in the world of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Only weeks into their marriage, a young couple embark on a six-month period of separation. Tom Cavendish goes to Japan to build lighthouses, and his wife, Ally, a doctor, begins her work at the Truro asylum. As the couple navigate their separate professional trials, the foundations of their marriage begin to slip. An exquisite novel of the 1880s told in alternating parts: two maps of absence - two distinct but conjoined portraits of loneliness and determination.