From Ross Raisin, the massively acclaimed author of God's Own Country and one of the best young British novelists today, comes Waterline, a devastating and definitive novel of our times.Mick Little used to be a shipbuilder on the Glasgow yards. But as they closed one after another down the river, the search for work took him and his beloved wife Cathy to Australia, and back again, struggling for a living, longing for home. Thirty years later the yards are nearly all gone and Cathy is dead. And now Mick will have to find a new way to live: to get away, start again, and try to deal with the guilt he feels over her death. In Waterline, Ross Raisin brings vividly to life the story of an ordinary man caught between the loss of a great love and the hard edges of modern existence.'A poignant, shocking, cunningly crafted classic ... the definitive novel for our times' Scotsman'Heartbreaking ... brilliant. There are rare novels that embed themselves in your sensibility so profoundly you can imagine conversations arising between characters that never occurred on the page . . . A work of grace: a human being rendered by a triumph of ventriloquism and empathy' Alan Warner, GuardianRoss Raisin was born in 1979 in West Yorkshire. His first novel, God's Own Country was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for nine literary awards including the Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2009 Ross Raisin was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. He lives in London.

In a voice as dim as a lighthouse on a rainy night, he said, "Beware of loving a woman who loves bridges.†?'Once upon a September in Paris...Still heartsick over the break-up of his relationship with the alluring, elusive novelist Hayat, the narrator of The Dust of Promises finds himself adrift in Paris, where he has come to receive a photography award.His photograph of a traumatised war-orphan has been declared profoundly affecting by the judges, but he knows that no picture can ever fully capture the desolation and destruction he has witnessed in his Algerian homeland. When he stumbles into an art exhibition on one of the capital's side streets, he is struck by the power of the paintings and feels impelled to learn more about the artist – an Algerian exile whose painful longing for the country he has lost shines out of his work. The artist is none other than Khaled, the man who haunted the pages of...

The last piece of a literary puzzle falls into place in the final novel of Benjamin Markovits's Byron trilogy.When his former colleague Peter Sullivan dies, Ben Markovits inherits unpublished manuscripts about the life of Lord Byron—including the novels Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. Ben's own literary career is in the doldrums, and he tries to revive it by publishing and writing about his dead friend, whose reimagining of Byron's lost memoirs—titled Childish Loves—may provide a key to Sullivan's own life and tarnished reputation.Acting as a literary sleuth, Ben sorts through boxes of Sullivan's writing; reads between the lines of his scandalous, Byron- inspired stories; meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead; and tracks down people from Peter's past in an effort to untangle rumor from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and...

Two men meet briefly in a hospital, where both are visiting their dying fathers. They speak again just a few months later, when one of them impulsively calls the other, a psychologist, and a friendship of sorts starts to form. After the psychologist leaves his wife a few weeks later, she begins to fall in love with his friend, creating a triangle that threatens to destroy all three and their families. The wife must decide between two very different men, whom she loves in very different ways. As the focus of the novel turns toward the woman in the middle, it becomes increasingly clear that whomever she chooses, the effect on the lives of everyone involved will be immeasurable. Regret, fear, grief, anger, anxiety, wistfulness, and yearning - these people's lives hang tenuously in the balance of their own conflicting emotions. With remarkable grace and acuity, Antonya Nelson examines two families in the midst of uncertainty and self-doubt, in a moving, resonant novel that displays...

'What are you feeling so anxious about? I'm the guy who has to go out there and lose.''That's what I don't like. That's what you don't realise. It's harder on the rest of us.''I'm sure it must be,' he said.Tolstoy claimed: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. But what if the happy families are actually the most unusual of all?Paul Essinger is a mid-ranking tennis professional on the ATP tour. His girlfriend Dana is an ex-model and photographer, and the mother of their two-year-old son, Cal. Together they form a tableau of the contented upper-middle-class New York family. But summer storms are blowing through Manhattan, and Paul's parents have come to stay in the build-up to the US Open. Over the course of the weekend, several generations of domestic tension are brought to boiling point . . . What does it mean to be a family? To be an individual? And how do we deal with the...

RetailMichael Chabon once said, “I scan the tables of contents of magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that she has decided to bless us again.” And now she has blessed us again, with a bounty of the stories for which she is so beloved. Her stories are clear-eyed, hard-edged, beautifully formed. In the title story, “Funny Once,” a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In “The Village,” a woman visits her father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage son’s relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the novella “Three Wishes,” siblings muddle through in the aftermath of their elder brother’s too-early departure from the world. The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Throughout, there is the pervasive desire to drink to forget, to have sex with the wrong people, to hit the road and figure out later where to stop for the night. These characters are aging, regretting actions both taken and not, inhabiting their extended adolescences as best they can. And in Funny Once, their flawed humanity is made beautiful, perfectly observed by one of America’s best short story writers.**From BooklistStarred Review Nelson’s run as one of the finest contemporary short story writers takes an exhilarating leap forward with her outrageously superb seventh collection. Her particular wizardry in the short form (Nelson is also the author of four novels) is found in her exceptional melding of pristine prose with a rampaging imagination and a comic’s perfect timing. Nelson is scandalously funny, her characters are royally screwed up and wildly inept, and their dire predicaments bust down the doors on the most painful of life’s cruel jokes, from betrayal to divorce, addiction, and old age. Nelson excels at multigenerational chaos, portraying with equal verve surprising children and ornery adults as well as neurotic dogs and places rife with hidden angst, namely Wichita, Telluride, and Houston. She traces the odd geometry of divorce that leads to one woman living with and caring for her ex-husband’s stepmother. Forced to bring their enraged, dementia-addled father, lashed with duct tape to his recliner, to a nursing home, the dysfunctional motherless siblings in “Three Wishes” continue to grieve over their older brother’s death long ago. Each of Nelson’s magnetizing stories generates atomic vibrancy and achieves the psychic mass of a novel. And who can resist lines like this—“Life is a series of lessons you don’t want to learn”? --Donna Seaman Review"Antonya Nelson’s gloriously debauched new collection, Funny Once, finds that conventions are made for flouting, from an eminent professor who sleeps with his young wife’s best friend to former college competitors who embark on a lost weekend." —Vogue  "[Nelson shows] great talent in constructing each story in its own unique world . . . [She] makes sure that we see the silliness alongside the strife, and the heart within the hardships." —Time Out New York, four stars "In her rewarding new collection, Funny Once, Antonya Nelson expertly dissects the lives of her troubled Midwestern and mountain-time characters—frantic teens, finicky fathers, abandoned wives, know-it-all neighbors, sorrowful siblings, festering friendships—dosing their domestic dramas and existential hurts with splendid shots of unexpected whimsy, familiar pleasures, and incurable love." —Elle  "Nelson’s run as one of the finest contemporary short story writers takes an exhilarating leap forward with her outrageously superb seventh collection. Her particular wizardry in the short form (Nelson is also the author of four novels) is found in her exceptional melding of pristine prose with a rampaging imagination and a comic’s perfect timing. Nelson is scandalously funny, her characters are royally screwed up and wildly inept, and their dire predicaments bust down the doors on the most painful of life’s cruel jokes, from betrayal to divorce, addiction, and old age. Nelson excels at multigenerational chaos, portraying with equal verve surprising children and ornery adults as well as neurotic dogs and places rife with hidden angst, namely Wichita, Telluride, and Houston . . . Each of Nelson’s magnetizing stories generates atomic vibrancy and achieves the psychic mass of a novel." —Booklist, starred review  "[Nelson is] at the peak of her game." —Publishers Weekly  "Graced with credible characters whose friendships, marriages, progeny, and divorces feel familiar and lived in, Nelson's supple stories have appeared in prestigious magazines and prize anthologies for two decades. This seventh short story collection (her tenth book of fiction) will delight longtime fans while likely propelling new readers to explore her earlier work. . . . The narratives are driven by characters whose crises and moments of insight take the reader by surprise, but Nelson herself is completely in control of her complex tales, in which infidelities are exposed or never quite happen and old friends surprise one another with new revelations that take 20 pages to unfold. . . . Nelson is one of the leading practitioners of the contemporary short story." —Library Journal, starred review

Sam Marsdyke is a lonely young man, dogged by an incident in his past and forced to work his family farm instead of attending school in his Yorkshire village. He methodically fills his life with daily routines and adheres to strict boundaries that keep him at a remove from the townspeople. But one day he spies Josephine, his new neighbor from London. From that moment on, Sam's carefully constructed protections begin to crumble—and what starts off as a harmless friendship between an isolated loner and a defiant teenage girl takes a most disturbing turn.