An intimate, magical novel about one enduring church in a rural Icelandic valley – an ode to a quiet way of life now lost to time forever The resting place of legendary Viking warrior Egil Skallagrímsson’s skull, Mosfell Church is a lonely, country church, fated to be destroyed. But as the plans to destroy it take shape, stories, myth and folklore abound in one magical last attempt to leave Mosfell standing.
In a single afternoon’s walk, Virginia Woolf captures the infinite life of a garden… A couple pause among the flowerbeds, their thoughts drifting apart. A woman’s mind fixes on a small, troubling mark on the wall.
A chance meeting becomes an imagined life, rich with longing and regret. In six luminous, experimental stories, Virginia Woolf remakes the short story as a space of transcendence. Moving fluidly between inner lives and outward scenes, Kew Gardens captures moments of consciousness as they shimmer, fracture and pass, revealing the beauty and strangeness of everyday existence.
Includes the stories: Kew Gardens, The Mark on the Wall, An Unwritten Novel, Monday or Tuesday, The String Quartet and Blue & Green
Dylan Thomas’s vivid, affectionate portrait of youth – and the journey towards finding one’s own artistic voiceA boy grows up in a small Welsh town, moving through school, family life and first encounters with the wider world in moments of mischief and self-discovery. Along the way, a sensibility begins to take shape – playful, observant and alive to the strangeness of the everyday.
One of Cinema’s great masters revisits his childhood – and the end of his parent’s marriage – in a novella of awakening. Over the course of one summer, eight-year-old Pu Bergman realises that his parents are no longer in love. Surrounded by the quiet idyll of the Swedish countryside, with its ponds, rivers and woods, the daily chaos of the family’s ramshackle summer home threatens to end the bright, brilliant haze of Pu’s childhood world.
A magical portrait of the mundane and everyday, made otherworldly in Gertrude Stein’s one-of-a-kind prose poetry. Objects. Food.
And, Rooms. Together these three subjects make up Tender Buttons, Gerturde Stein’s beautifully strange, everyday poetic observations about the world and home around her.
A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino’s miniature masterpiece. A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Having mysteriously lost their powers of speech, they must tell their tales using only a deck of tarot cards.
As their stories interlink and overlap, a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of the human quest for meaning unfolds.
The classic, moving tale of a man born old, destined to die young, and live at odds with his time
To the confusion and embarrassment of his family, Benjamin Button is born an old man. As the years pass, he grows younger – moving against the current of ordinary life. While those around him age as expected, Benjamin finds himself increasingly out of step, his relationships strained by a life no one else can share.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quietly unsettling tale of being a misfit to one’s time. Includes the stories: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Winter Dreams and ‘The Sensible Thing’
Three supernatural tales of longing and loss from the grand-dame of Gothic fiction, Mary Shelley When a storm drives their boat towards the rocks, a group of sailors is saved by the light of a ruined tower. The locals speak of the Invisible Girl who haunts it – a lost, wandering soul. But the truth is more disturbing, and far more human, than any ghost story.
Includes the stories: The Invisible Girl, The Mortal Immortal and The Mourner
A startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, from the author of I Who Have Never Known Men
In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest, forbidden from ever leaving its strange depths. As part of her rigid schooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe. Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed – until she begins to pursue her own.
Includes the stories: The Ardennes Forest, The Outcast and The Broom Cupboard
Two sisters must find their way in a world designed to confine them. Marcelle is the elder sister, a woman whose ambitions focus on becoming the companion of a ‘man of genius’. Marguerite is the younger sister, a girl whose sanity depends on breaking free of the oppressive expectations of society.
Both end up focusing their attentions on the same disappointing man.