Translated from Italian by Howard CurtisPublished by Abacus, 2007, 357 pages. Original version published in 2005. A man is brutally murdered in a shop in Greve, a town near Florence. Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara, head of the Squadra Mobile, is called to investigate. The victim, Stefano Micali, worked at a shop selling religious artefacts. He …
Category: Fiction
The Owl, The River and the Valley: Arupa Patangia Kalita
Translated from Assamese by Mitra PhukanPublished by Penguin, 2025, 338 pages. Stories in the original version published over several years. “Certainly, their parents must have given these women a name. Those names were lost in the river of time. What indeed did they have that would allow them to hold their names firmly in their …
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The Case of the Elusive Bombay Duck: Tarquin Hall
Published by Severn House, 2025, 214 pages Most Private Investigator Vish Puri is getting ready to go to London to receive the International Detective of the Year award. He and his wife Rumpi are looking forward to the week-long trip and plan to make a holiday of it. Unfortunately, nothing works out the way Puri …
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James: Percival Everett
Published by Random House / Mantle / Picador, 2024, 303 pages “My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. ... I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant …
Stepping through the Looking Glass: A Journey through Speculative Fiction
Photo: SH Design via AdobeStock “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — / Of cabbages — and kings — / And why the sea is boiling hot — / And whether pigs have wings.’”—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding …
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The Haunting Season—Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights
Authors: Bridget Collins, Laura Purcell, Elizabeth Macneal, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Jess Kidd, Natasha Pulley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and Andrew Michael HurleyPublished by Sphere, 2021, 293 pages There is something about December that seems to call for ghost stories. So I have picked a collection of eight ghostly tales written by contemporary writers. The stories are …
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All Stray Dogs Go To Heaven: Krishna Candeth
Published by BluOne Ink, 2023, 540 pages “We eat our poisons young and then trawl the world the rest of our lives, looking for antidotes.” Humans are intrinsically storytellers, and the stories we tell about ourselves shape who we are. They give form to our world, and each of us carries our own personal world …
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Classic Horror Stories
Edited by David Stuart DaviesPublished by Macmillan, 2024, 310 pages There is something about reading a well-written horror story: the chills that run down your spine, the fear, and the feeling of being in the story while sitting at a comfortable distance from any actual danger. This collection is guaranteed to make you shiver, with …
Orbital: Samantha Harvey
Published by Vintage, 2023, 136 pages “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in the dark, and of the bright energetic black of space …
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: Deesha Philyaw
Published by One, 2020, 217 pages A girl watches her mother make the perfect peach cobbler every week for her date with the married pastor; a woman writes to her half-sister about whose existence she learns only after their father dies; and two women live together in the cold north, far from their southern roots. …
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