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Gabriela Babnik's novel Dry Season breaks the mold of what we usually expect from a writer from a small, Central European nation. With a global perspective, Babnik takes on the themes of racism, the role of women in modern society and the loneliness of the human condition. Dry Season is a record of an unusual love affair. Anna is a 62-year-old designer from Central Europe and Ismael is a 27-year-old African who was brought up on the street, where he was often the victim of abuse. What unites them is the loneliness of their bodies, a tragic childhood and the dry season, or 'Harmattan', during which neither nature nor love is able to flourish. She soon realizes that the emptiness between them is not really caused by their skin colour and age difference, but predominantly by her belonging to the Western culture in which she has lost or abandoned all the preordained roles of daughter, wife and mother. Sex does not outstrip the loneliness and repressed secrets from the past surface into a world she sees as much crueller and, at the same time, more innocent than her own.Cleverly written as an alternating narrative of both sides in the relationship, the novel is interlaced with magic realism and accurately perceived fragments of African political reality.

Powerfully inventive and atmospheric, Strega is a modern gothic story of nine young women on the cusp of inheriting society''s submission to violence, and the age-long myths that uphold it.With little boxes of liquorice, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, Rafa arrives at the remote Alpine town of Strega to work at the grand Olympic Hotel. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff uniforms of seasonal workers and are taught to iron, cook, and make the beds by austere matrons. In spare moments between tasks, the girls start to enjoy each other''s company as they pick herbs in the garden, read in the library, and take in the scenery. But when the hotel suddenly fills with people for a raucous party, one of the girls disappears. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths young women are told, what they are raised to expect from the world, the violence they are made to endure, and, ultimately, the question of whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.A monument to long-dead maids and their shrouded knowledge, Johanne Lykke Holm''s luminescent and jagged prose, delivered in Saskia Vogel''s incisive translation, resonates like a spell that keeps exerting its powers long after reading.

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.Compiled from the Researchers'' disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

The Boiled in Between is the debut novel by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, a bold and daring work of fiction which transposes the poetic sensibility of Marten''s visual work to the page. It is a challenging, playful, enigmatic, tactile and deliberately ambiguous work of great inventiveness, which will establish Marten as an exceptional talent and unique voice in contemporary fiction.The novel began as an attempt to map the structure and stories of a house; within its tilted, sensuous, alchemical world, characters navigate strange, meticulously indexed landscapes – real and conceptual – to question language and definition and illuminate the associative movements of our minds. Spliced between three voices, the narrative is a project always in movement. The characters traverse these in-betweens: the hot-blooded living world; the curious disembodiment of the imagination; and the rampant snipping away at time in a progression morbidly (and comically) ever closer to death.

Lamento is a love story that questions the possibility of reconciling the magic of infatuation with everyday life. The story begins with a fire - an image which permeates the novel. The narrator, a writer, meets a theatre artist; their love feels ecstatic and utopian, completely untouched by the outside world. But with the birth of a child, the weight of the everyday turns their passion destructive. The woman fights for every minute she can to write, while the man abandons family life to focus on his art. Their private drama is further confronted by the jagged realities of colonialism and injustice, forcing them to see themselves as part of a violent history they cannot escape. As love turns to hate, we follow their restless search to understand the enigma of love. In a startling act of reverse auto-fiction, Madame Nielsen a legendary figure of the Danish avant-garde inhabits the voice of the woman she once loved to interrogate the man she once was. The result is an unsparing reconciliation of gender and memory, a lament that strips away self-pity to expose the narcissistic cost of creative obsession, and a meditation on how gender alters our experience of the world.

A regional office supplies magnate who yearns to be a poet.A purchasing manager who sees big city life as the route to avoiding school reunion shame.An interior design fanatic who needs to make up her mind about a contentious mug.We''ll Call You is a collection of nine stories of the aspirations, self-deception, apathy and despair of the modern job interview, written by Jacob Sundberg, a communications officer and freelance writer.

Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music."Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance." Rebecca Tamás

Michael Strunge was one of the key protagonists of the Danish 1980s poetry scene. Speed of Life was the first of 11 collections of poetry he published in a brief career, before ending his life aged 27.

Inlands is the story of a young woman moving from Stockholm to a small community on the edge of the Arctic Circle, to her boyfriend''s home town. But when their relationship ends shortly after her arrival, she decides not to return to the city. It''s a brilliantly wrought piece of fiction, an account of our protagonists''s struggles to adjust to new customs, with a quiet poetry to the descriptions of her experience in the alternating endless sunlight and bitter cold of the Swedish inlands.

When Kafka Met Einstein is the first full collection from Scottish poet James Knox Whittet.The poems combine the playful and the intellectual, moving easily between Nietzsche and the Teletubbies. Brought up on the island of Islay, some of Knox Whittet's poetry is inspired by the landscapes and history of Scottish islands, while elsewhere he is at Newport Pagnell Service Station at 3am, or writing about Iris Murdoch's Alzheimer's. There is also a poem about the little-known fact that Hitler attended the same school as Wittgenstein.This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.James Knox Whittet was born and brought up on the Hebridean island of Islay, where his father was head gardener at a small castle. His poems have won the George Crabbe Memorial Award three times. His first poetry pamphlet, A Brief History Of Devotion, was published by Hawthorn Press in 2003; his second, Seven Poems for Engraved Fishermen, was shortlisted for the Callum MacDonald Award from the National Library of Scotland (2004). He has previously edited two acclaimed anthologies for Iron Press: 100 Island Poems of Great Britain and Ireland (2005) and Writers on Islands (2008); the latter was nominated by the Scotsman as one of the Books of the Year. He now lives in Norfolk.

- "A woman I won''t forget ... a book that people will love." Diana Athill, Jean Rhys' publisher and award-winning biographer.- "My aunt's love of Dominica and its people is as freshly painted as if it happened yesterday." Katie Fforde, novelist.- Elma Napier's remarkable memoir chronicles her love affair with the wild Caribbean island of Dominica. It began in 1932 when she turned her back on London's high society to build a home in Calibishie, a remote village on Dominica's north coast. There are tales of literary house parties, of war and death, smugglers and servants and, above all, of stories inspired by her political life as the only woman in a colonial parliament. She writes deftly about the island's turbulent landscapes and her curiosity about the lives and culture of its people.Elma Napier was born in Scotland in 1892, the daughter of Sir William Gordon Cumming, who was accused of cheating while playing cards with the Prince of Wales. After living in Australia for nine years, Napier settled in Dominica with her second husband in 1932. She became the first woman to sit in any West Indian parliament. Apart from Black and White Sands (written in 1962), she wrote two novels and two memoirs of her early life. She died in Dominica in 1973.

Do Not Pass Go by Joel Lane is the first Hotwire short story pamphlet from Nine Arches Press.These five crime stories dive into the shady undertow of Britain's second city, walking with characters you might well want to cross the road to avoid. Lane's prose is never less than deft, subtle and impressive, the stories taut and teeming with urban detail, always on the brink of either violence or revelation."Joel Lane documents a life we don't quite live, in a city we can't quite find: half glimpsed and half imagined, we know it's out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe. Mixing fear with desire, reputation with regret. Touching the blood-beat of our secret hunger with the rhythms of a music that never felt alien till now. Wasted lives, with never a wasted word. It's an extraordinary achievement: vivid as neon, real as rain. Devastating."Chaz Brenchley, author of Shelter, Blood Waters, The Garden and other critically acclaimed works of crime fiction.Joel Lane lives in Birmingham and works as a journalist. He is the author of two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask; three collections of short stories, The Earth Wire, The Lost District and The Terrible Changes; a novella, The Witnesses are Gone; a chapbook, Black Country; and three collections of poetry, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland and The Autumn Myth. Joel has co-edited (with Steve Bishop) the crime and suspense fiction anthology Birmingham Noir. He has also edited an anthology of subterranean horror stories, Beneath the Ground; and co-edited (with Allyson Bird) an anthology of anti-fascist and anti-racist stories in the weird and speculative fiction genres, Never Again.

Luke Kennard's Planet Shaped Horse is an unhinged blackcomedy poemplay from one of contemporary poetry's most unique voices. When the (anti)hero of the piece is enduring a somewhat 'enforced' stay at Fouracres Halfway House, entanglements ensue. Both terrible and beautiful things happen.Hermits and doctors are not what they seem and neither Miranda nor Simon seem capable of reining in or reforming their unreliable narrator...

The Terrors is a sequence of imagined emails; poetic missives from the start of the 21st century to inmates at London''s notorious Newgate Prison. Mimicking the tone of its primary source, The Newgate Calendar, The Terrors tacks from horror to humour, from moral disgust to the casual chitchat of the digital generation, all the time delineating London''s violent urban undercurrent in bold, energetic and sometimes shocking language.

The debut pamphlet by Rachel Piercey, 2008 winner of the prestigious Newdigate Prize, previously won by Oscar Wilde, James Fenton and Andrew Motion.'Piercey's oscillations between lover's ecstasy and love poet's objectivity are so deft that her analytical lens becomes as much a fascination as the amorous perspective which it focuses. […] Wright's drawings are exuberant throughout, by turns cartoonish and painterly, playful and simple in the manner of Quentin Blake.' – Andrew Wynn Owen, the Oxonian Review.A charming collection of love poems by Rachel Piercey, containing her unique reflections on love, heartbreak and relationships. Romantic but never sentimental, Piercey brings her characteristic emotional and linguistic clarity to her treatment of this universal human experience and across the twelve poems builds up a nuanced study of love, passion, heartache and bitterness. The poems are illustrated with line drawings which complement the text and offers the reader a way into the poems via Wright's personal response.

David Almond is now known around the world as the author of the novels Skellig, Kit's Wilderness and The Savage. His first two books – Sleepless Nights (1985) and A Kind of Heaven (1997) – were published by Iron Press, a selection of which appears in Nesting alongside two previously unpublished tales. The stories draw deeply from the Tyneside estate of Almond's childhood, exploring the themes that would inform his later work, and displaying all the rhythm, lyricism and drive for which he is acclaimed today."A master storyteller."The Independent"There is nobody quite like Almond writing in adults' or children's fiction today. A writer of visionary, Blakean intensity."The Times"David Almond's books are strange, unsettling wild things. They are, like all great literature, beyond classification."The GuardianDavid Almond was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. His many awards include the Whitbread Children's Book Award (twice), the Carnegie Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. My Name is Nina, the prequel to Skellig, was published in 2010. His books have been translated into over 40 languages, and adapted for both stage and screen. He now lives in Northumberland.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Shortlisted for the 2013 William Trevor / Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Award.Best known for her novels, Kitty Fitzgerald is also an accomplished short-story writer. Miranda's Shadow, her debut full collection, brings together a series of provocative, richly conceived stories that share the same dark, fabulous drama that saw her novel Pigtopia (Faber, 2006) garner such grand acclaim.Just what is Alice Noonan's secret? And who is the strange wino with the voice of an angel? And why does nobody go in or out of the Faulkners' house? These are tales of temptation, suspicion and murder – from savage fairies to the photographer who saw too much."A writer of stylistic daring who cuts her own furrow."The ScotsmanKitty Fitzgerald was born in Ireland. Her short story 'The Bones of St Ignatius' won the Notes from the Underground / Latitude Festival Short Story Competition in 2009. Her fourth novel, Pigtopia, was published by Faber in 2006, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is the editor of the Iron Press anthology Root: New Stories by North-East Writers, published in February 2013. Four of her plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Northumberland.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Root is a collection of short stories which re-affirm the North-East's status as a vibrant area for new writing.The subjects of the 13 stories on show here range from the domestic – family relationships, gardening, bullying, adoption and loss – to the plain bizarre: a circus bearded lady, a woman who morphs into Elvis, and an insight into what God wears to work.The writers featured in Root include Avril Joy, Fiona Cooper, Amanda Baker and Rob Walton.Kitty Fitzgerald was born in Ireland, and now lives in Northumberland. A poet, playwright and novelist, her latest novel is Pigtopia (Faber, 2006), critically acclaimed in the Independent and the Scotsman and a finalist in the Barnes & Noble Discover Awards in the US in 2006. She has edited two anthologies of fiction for Iron Press: Iron Women: New Stories by Women (1990) and Biting Back: New Fiction from the North (2001). In 2009 her story 'The Bones of St Ignatious' won the Latitude Festival / Notes from the Underground short-story competition.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Runner-Up for Best Anthology in the 2014 Saboteur Awards.The Apple Anthology is a rich harvest of new, recent and ancient poetry, prose and visual art from a global array of writers, artists and scientists.The Anthology tells the story of how apples migrated from Northeast China to Europe, how to make zyder and why apples are such potent symbols of beauty, temptationand sexuality. Here you will encounter an apple clock, fruity surrealism, apples from Chernobyl and a tree called Camilla.You will meet King Byerd, Lady Henniker, The Bloody Ploughman, Pig's Snout, Slack Ma Girdle and countless other characterful apple varieties.Pushing the boundaries of genre and subject specialism, all of these creations look at apples in new, challenging and surprising ways.With a foreword by David Morley, contributions from members of the Worshipful Company of Fruiterers, and a range of intellectuals, creators and collagists, The Apple Anthology is bursting with flavour and delight.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

A young man writes a letter to the woman who rejected him. Driven by doubt and unbridled desire, he tries to write himself to a new understanding of his loneliness.At the same time, he suspects literature is to blame for all of this.He therefore dreams of literature that cures the need for literature, literature where life has precedence.Restless is a disobedient short novel, narrated by aphorisms and small episodes of everyday life, conveyed by a presence and an intensity that never folds back to a personal darkness.Restless also contains remains of an almost extinct classic ideal. At least hope: Books can make us better people."I only have one book in me, after all. It''s called "How I Learned to Love," and I hope to write it over and over again, with little variations until I die. "

"A beautifully illustrated poetic depiction of an island I love with all my heart." Trish Cooke"A feast for the ears and eyes." Margaret Bateson-Hill"The rhythms, sights and sounds of the Caribbean are beautifully captured. A real joy!" Valerie BloomSaying good night "to all things we love": in a homage to a magical Caribbean island, Good Night Sweet Island takes the reader through a poetic and visually stimulating journey. Each verse celebrates aspects of tropical island life: birds and animals, dance and music, fruit and food, rivers and forests, sea and beach. As the sun goes down, a child says a dreamy good night to all the rich experiences of the day.

An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean makes a major contribution to providing a fuller picture of the region''s rich literary history. It both restores our knowledge of writers whose lives and work have slipped out of view while heralding others whose work has never been properly recognised. Offering a fascinating insight into the worlds of these ''lost'' writers, this A-Z also provides future researchers with a comprehensive bibliography of their forgotten works. An inspiring reclaiming of writers, especially women, from Antigua, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad: those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; those disregarded by the establishment; those whose personal or professional lives stole their writing lives; those who suffered discrimination; those who wrote about the "wrong" things. All are celebrated in this brilliantly researched and compiled book.

Delving into his life and experiences of love, loss growing up mixed-race in Newport, and more, this is the debut poetry collection from award-winning multidisciplinary artist and former Children''s Laureate Wales Connor Allen.

Seven of the best recent short stories, disassembled by their authors.An innovative anthology revealing the inspiration, the ideals and the work involved in a great short story. Reverse Engineering brings together contemporary classic stories with their authors'' discussions of how they were written.

The sequel to the critically acclaimed Reverse Engineering. Reverse Engineering II brings together contemporary classic stories with their authors'' discussions of how they were written. An essential book for everyone interested in how fiction works...

A collection of stories written in duet.Eight highly original stories, each woven from the joint inspiration of two amazing writers.Sixteen celebrated authors respond, play, twist and develop their story in turn. Without the certainty of being in full control, Duets brings a new dimension to the drama of reading and writing.

The Unreliable Nature Writer is the eagerly-awaited debut collection of exhilarating, macabre and dreamy short stories from Claire Carroll. Shortlisted for The White Review Prize and winner of the Short Fiction Wild Writing Prize, Carroll portrays an unsettlingly hot, vaguely familiar world of humans facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies, failing environments and unknowable natural crises. Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories about love, loss, strangely-exposing housing applications and cows.

For archaeologist Maxine 'Max' Falkland, life in early-50s London is difficult enough as she tries to move on from the death of her brother, an RAF pilot shot down over Korea. But, when she meets John Knox things get more complicated, before they get outright dangerous.Flying her light plane to Scotland, Max overhears whispered arguments in Russian coming from the next-door room and sees lights across the moors that appear to answer flashes from the sea. Add the mysterious malfunction of her plane and she has a lot to confide when she encounters the enigmatic Richard Ash, a local landowner and recluse. But when Knox unexpectedly reappears and a dive goes disastrously wrong, Max must act fast as she finds herself in the middle of a Soviet military plot.An accomplished debut novel from a US voice writing in the UK, Cold Crash is fast-paced with enthralling characters and perfect detail.

When Henry Bennett, (Hal), returns to his childhood home of Leverbridge he hopes that he will meet the love of his life, Lizzie, again: his childhood sweetheart who jilted him at the altar. Instead he finds that she has been pronounced dead after being missing for 10 years.Unable to put the past behind him, Hal is drawn into events he would prefer to forget, including the discovery of the remains of Alicia, who disappeared aged six when Hal was a ten-year-old, in the grounds of Leverbridge Manor, close to Hal''s home at the Gatehouse. As Hal''s life unravels, it begins to resemble a ''Kim''s Game'', a memory game in which items placed on a tray are removed one by one. What did happen to Lizzie? What are the dark secrets of the family at the Manor? What is lost and what remains? A gripping debut novel, part thriller and part character-study, The Kim''s Game is an utterly convincing read.