Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Anthologies & Short Stories

A dazzling new collection of short stories, spanning 15 years of writing, from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End.

1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm. Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion and confusion, greeting him with the puzzled question ‘What are you?’ Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it.

The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny’s characters range from mischievous to tender. In ‘Bridesmaid, Revisited,’ Marilee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid’s dress to work. In ‘Twist and Shout,’ Ericka’s elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In ‘Turn Back, Turn Back,’ a bedtime storxy coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor’s deception. And in ‘561,’ Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husband’s ex-wife move out of the family home.

The new edition of Salley Vicker’s sensational debut novel. ‘Miss Garnet’s Angel’ is a voyage of discovery; a novel about Venice but also the rich story of the explosive possibilities of change in all of us at any time. Julia Garnet is a teacher. Just retired, she is left a legacy which...

A brilliant collection of short stories from the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Hilary Mantel is one of Britain’s most accomplished and acclaimed writers. In these ten bracingly subversive tales, all her gifts of characterisation and observation...

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR AN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘What was it about complaining that felt so good? You and your fellow sufferer emerging from a thorough session as if from a spa bath, refreshed and tingling?’ The first-ever collection of short stories from Pulitzer...

From the Pultizer Prize-winning author of ‘The Hours’, comes the story of a marriage thrown off course by a moment of mistaken identity. Peter Harris is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment and a player in the contemporary art scene. He has been married to Rebecca...

The wonderful story collection from the author of Standard Deviation ‘Heiny's work does something magical: gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve and makes you laugh along the way’ Lena Dunham ‘Like Cheever mixed with Ephron’ New York Times ‘Simply wonderful, I...

The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa during the years of Arpartheid. Set in Rhodesia, ‘The Grass is Singing’ tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who...

A classic tale from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, of a family torn apart by the arrival of Ben, their feral fifth child. ‘Listening to the laughter, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David would reach for each other’s hand, and smile, and breathe...

The new novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes. As Eli Gold, a famous old writer lies dying in a hospital in New York, his family gather around his bed. His first wife Violet is too old to travel from London but Harvey, their son...

Eley Williams returns with a subversive and essential collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient – from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. Whether jostling for attention or ducking to evade it, her characters seek connections not only with each other but also to versions of themselves.

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.

On an island off Ireland’s west coast strange things are afoot: two teenage boys set fires while their worlds fall apart, a couple drive out to the hills in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, a widow seeks a stranger’s help to bury her grief and a horse crashes a house party. Adrift in the treacherous waters of small-town boredom, the residents reach out with love and cruelty, desperation and hope, in their pursuit of connection. 

Commissioned by the New York Times to write a story on any aspect of the 2016 presidential campaign, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie created a delicious, subversive, incisive fictional account of Melania Trump Once, in the early years, before she fully understood him, she had asked what his favourite...

This debut collection movingly explores how women and girls are looked at, look at one another and look at themselves, and how living as an object can shape their passions, fears and joys. With a clear eye and dark humour, Danielle Pender considers sex, parenting, grief and class as lenses for the ways in which the world watches women—and how women are always watching back.

‘Astonishing – one of those rare books that manages to be both poignant and hilarious. The last time we had a debut this big was Junot Díaz with ‘Drown’. Holmes is a major talent.’ Philipp Meyer A fresh, honest, and darkly funny debut collection about family, friends, and lovers, and...

An uncanny, startlingly beautiful story collection steeped in the Cornish landscape, from the award-winning author of Diving Belles and Other Stories and Weathering. At the very edge of England, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the land and visitors flock in with the summer like seagulls, there is...

What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost? These stories take us into the heart of contemporary New York City and its residents’ lives. We meet children, grandmothers and even ghosts as they strive to connect, to stand up for, and to really see each other. Their relationships shape not only their own futures but those of their families and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships, Witness enacts its own testimony.

From the author of the bestsellers The Bride Stripped Bare and With My Body, a new twist on a classic tale of passion. Set in Notting Hill, this modern day version of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, sees a banker’s wife awaken to the erotic possibilities of her life. It begins by describing...