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The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including Granta, and won the International PEN/David Wong award in 2003. Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy award for debut fiction. She will be a Hodder fellow at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year. She lives in Nigeria. A collection of short stories from the Orange Prize-winning author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Praise for Half of a Yellow Sun:

'I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate - and we, her readers, are even luckier.' Edmund White

'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.' Chinua Achebe

'Heartbreaking, funny, exquisitely written and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic.' Daily Mail

A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers

In this extraordinary first collection, Yiyun Li brings us a modern China facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt. In 'Immortality', winner of the Paris Review prize, a young man bears a striking resemblance to the dictator, and so finds a strange kind of calling. In 'Extra', first published in the New Yorker, a Chinese woman, alone in middle age, befriends a young boy who has become an outcast in a remote country school. In their friendship, we see how love can begin to overcome the strictures that dominate their lives.

In turn horrifying and breathtakingly lyrical, Yiyun Li, a new and talented young Chinese writer, confronts the silence that dominated the history of her country, and illuminates how mythology, politics, history and culture intersect with personality. She leaves us with an enduring vision of a country undergoing tremendous change.

Mothers And Sons

"T ib n is a writer of extraordinary emotional clarity... These are beautiful stories, beautifully crafted" (Literary Review)

Mothers and Sons is a sensitive and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered.

A son buries his mother and goes out to a drug-fuelled rave on a remote beach near Dublin. In the course of this one night his grief and desire for raw feeling combine with exquisite intensity. A mother sings about treacherous love to a rapt crowd of musicians in a local pub. Her unacknowledged son meets her eyes, unable to approach her. And in A Long Winter, Colm T ib n's finest piece of fiction to date, a son goes searching for his mother in the snow-covered Pyrenees.

Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an acute, masterful and moving collection that confirms T ib n as a great prose stylist of our time.

Dark Roots

This collection of prize-winning short stories opens up worlds of small, finely observed detail, which go on resonating in the reader's mind long after the story is finished. From the awkward strain of dissolving relationships to the revealing vagaries of chance occurrences upon ordinary people, the voices that inhabit these worlds speak eloquently of the hidden motivations that propel us all, finally, to act. Often without realising it, these characters hold in their hands both the consequences of small decisions and – sometimes – the power of life and death.

Specific stories deal with the risks that are taken and the compromises that are made both in forging and in escaping relationships; with the traumas – whether related to illness or to loss – that incite us to desperate measures; and with the everyday coincidences that drive our lives. Each story slowly builds to its climax and invariably has a sting in its tail.

New Australian Stories

This eclectic anthology of new stories showcases some of our finest short-story writers and proves that the short story is alive and well in Australia. From seasoned practitioners of the form through to rising and emerging stars of the short-story firmament, New Australian Stories caters for all tastes. There’s humour, mystery, drama, and even some delusion and deceit. Whole lives are captured in just a few satisfying pages. Ideal for dipping into and perfect for those seeking inspiration and escape, this collection is designed for your reading pleasure.

Contributors include: Cate Kennedy, Amanda Lohrey, Carmel Bird, Tony Birch, Nicholas Jose, Paddy O’Reilly, Max Barry, Margo Lanagan, Lenny Bartulin, Michael McGirr, Georgia Blain, Chris Womersley, Patrick Cullen and many more.

The Turning

In the 1980s Tim Winton made his mark with tough, spare stories about youth and promise, of early parenthood and the challenges of loyalty. Now, almost twenty years since his last collection, he returns to the form with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia.

Here are turnings of all kinds – changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours – where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves.

Beautifully crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

From the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of Dirt Music comes an outstanding work of fiction that will resonate with readers everywhere.