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David Gaffney

The countryside – what is it for? A paradise on earth where you can relax and get creative? Or an outdoor wool factory where every other house is an Airbnb and there are fewer trees than Camden. In his new collection of short stories David Gaffney explores the theme of town versus country through a number of different lenses, including his own experience of being brought up in west Cumbria then moving to Manchester.
A creative residency on the coast of Scotland becomes weirder and weirder in "The Retreat"; 'I've always had the feeling that the countryside has something against me and that one day it will take its revenge.' In "The Table", a recluse in Penrith uses mid-century furniture to lure city dwellers into a world of 'depressed farmers with shotguns and bottomless pits of slurry that will swallow you so hard you'll never be seen again. And in "The Garages" the pressure of city living forces a man to become oddly obsessed with empty spaces. Often funny, often haunting, often profound, Gaffney uses dark humour and surreal characters to demonstrate a deep understanding of how places, urban or rural, can shape, influence and sometimes distort our lives. 'People who like the countryside tend to believe in things that aren't really there,' says a character in "The Country Pub".
These are indeed stories about things that aren't really there, and this is why they resonate with you long after you have stopped reading.

Salt

Salt Modern Stories

Concrete Fields

David Frankel

A plane crashes. A boy drowns. A body is found on a dark lakeside. A woman tries to make sense of a strange memory from her childhood. A father searches for a missing dog – his only link to his lost son. A boy on the brink of adolescence embarks on a journey and gets more than he bargained for. Young lovers get their kicks trespassing in empty houses. A young man prepares to leave his hometown for the last time, and a giant sink hole threatens to swallow everything.
In Forgetting Is How We Survive, people are haunted by ghosts of the past, tormented by doppelgangers and pining for the futures that have been lost to them. Each faces a turning point – an event that will move their life from one path to another, and every event casts a shadow.
The stories in this collection come from another England where earthy realism hides another world where anything is possible.

Forgetting is How We Survive

Jonathan Taylor

These are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk.
Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there's also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street, two ailing actors see animal shapes in clouds, a cancer survivor searches for a winning lottery ticket in her rundown flat. And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.

Scablands and Other Stories

Clare Fisher

'This new short story collection from Clare Fisher explores of feelings of failure around gender, sexuality, and work, that arise in a success-obsessed capitalist culture. Dazzling, playful, and experimental, it veers between the real, the surreal and the absurd.'