Bloomsbury

Early and Uncollected StoriesMavis Gallant is admired and beloved as one of the masters of the modern short story. Selected from early collections and the New Yorker, where many of the author's stories have appeared over the last fifty years, and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Cost of Livingreveals a writer coming into her own. The...

There's this set of things everyone expects from you...Since her boyfriend Gus was killed in 9/11, Billy has been pretending. It is easier for her to stay silent and go through the motions of grief than to tell the truth: that she was planning to leave Gus, and that his death left her feeling a mixture of ambivalence and anguish that she is...

Jane Mansfield, a gentleman's daughter in 1813 England, has long wished to escape a life in which career choices are limited to wife or maiden aunt. But awakening one morning in twenty-first-century Los Angeles - in the body of someone called Courtney Stone - is not exactly what she had in mind.Jane must quickly get to grips with a world in...

Hasan is eleven years old. He loves cricket, pomegranates, the night sky, his clever, vibrant artistic mother and his etymologically obsessed lawyer father, and he adores his next-door neighbour Zehra. One early summer morning, while lazing happily on the roof, Hasan watches a young boy flying a yellow kite fall to his death. Soon after,...

It is the seventies, at the height of flower power. Star has just joined Drop City, a hippie commune in sunny California living the simple, natural life. But underneath the drugs, music and transcendent bliss, she slowly discovers tensions and sexual rivalries that threaten to split the community apart. A world away in Boynton, a tiny town in the...

Growing up in the years following World War II, Joel Bloom always played soldiers with his friends. But by the time he's eighteen, the Vietnam War is in full swing, and it's not as simple as the war games he played when he was a child. Old enough to be drafted, Joel loves his country, but he knows that fighting in an unjust war isn't...