These eight tales range in scale from the novella-length to the minimalist, and in setting from Paris and Munich to London and several unidentified English cities. They explore diverse aspects of the relationship between men and women, both inside and outside marriage. They are by turns poignant, disturbing, chilling, ironical, humorous. - An academic and part-time writer resumes an affair that ended fifteen years before. - A schoolteacher leaves his wife but continues to live in the matrimonial home. - A victim of harassment by an ex-lover is attracted by the female detective sent to investigate the case. - A financial adviser is spied on at home and stalked on her way to work. - A divorced accountant wakes up with a hangover and can recall neither which day it is nor what he did the night before. - A hotel guest spends the night with the waitress who served him in the bar.

EPIPHANY & OTHER STORIES

PETER THORNTON

Xeno Books

Night Ferry and Other Stories

The author's fourth collection of stories. It comprises the novella THE MANNHEIM EXIT - 'Inclined by nature to inertia and prevarication, lacking notable personal ambition-whether for advancement, affluence, or office-disliking change and accepting it only when imposed on him from without-an occasional, unavoidable evil-preferring in all things the familiar and the well-tried, [Richard Carteris asked] of life no more than that the future should be a prolongation of the past via an uneventful present . . .' A university lecturer involves himself in an affair that threatens to destroy utterly the settled pattern of his existence - and three shorter stories: THE SILENCE OF JOSEPH B - A lover of silence evolves a strategy for survival in a world of intolerable noise; TRANSITION - A young man is disturbed by a glamorous Doppelgänger; and THE SLIDING DOORS - A narrator's acrimonious dispute with his author radically transforms the fate of the characters.

The Mannheim Exit

The year is 2039. The United Kingdom has ceased to exist as a sovereign state; England is a patchwork of de-industrialized provinces supplying wind-energy, agricultural products, and military manpower to Greater Europe. Would-be writer Tom Cochrane, returning from Afghanistan after eight years' service in the Eurolegion, faces the usual difficulties of integration into civilian life, but his are compounded by the legal and social discrimination he has suffered since childhood as the son of a Eurosceptic Dissident. His attempts to adjust are charted through his relationships with three very different women.

Cochrane's Return

These two novellas follow the conscientious but less than enthusiastic academic Richard Carteris at two defining moments of his career, both professional and personal. In THE MANNHEIM EXIT, set in Germany, he involves himself in an affair that threatens to destroy utterly the settled pattern of his existence. Twelve years later, in ATONEMENT, now married and Head of his Department at an English university, he finds history repeating itself, and is forced to confront an unresolved past.

Novellas Volume One: The Mannheim Exit & Atonement

Two novellas that explore the labyrinthine complexities of love.In KEPT WOMEN, chance gives businessman Carlo Blackridge and academic Laura Voisier, incommunicado for eight years, the possibility of resuming a love-affair neither wished to end. But their renewed relationship is complicated by others of a very different kind . . .In LIVE RAIL, Vincent Telford, convinced since childhood of life's ultimate pointlessness, has turned his back on the conventional career that could have been his for a railway porter's job. One November morning, his 8.00 regulars are joined by a strange young woman . . .

Novellas Volume Two: Kept Women & Live Rail

A Bug Collection is not for the squeamish. These stories about love, death, and the webby, tenuous intersections between the two take a humorous and heartbreaking look at the complexities of human life through the compound eyes of bugs. When a lone mayfly has a painful revelation about the ephemerality of her own existence, it sets in motion a chain of revelations by more bugs: a honey bee who struggles against a paralyzing depression; a katydid who comes to terms with a life-altering disability; a water strider who offers proof of reincarnation; a tribe of ants who must confront their individual and collective powerlessness in the face of a catastrophic event; a tumbling flower beetle who falls for an abusive mate; an earthworm who gains a Buddhist-like understanding of his place in the universe; and a host of other bugs who force us to consider what it means to be fully alive in a world of dung.

A Bug Collection

Literature & Fiction

Mansfield, Melody

Humor & Satire

Zethus is a sorcerer―a self-described spiritual thug for hire. He makes his living in CrossTown, a place where the manyworld hypothesis of modern physics manifests itself, where possibilities and probabilities overlap. Caught up in a web of intrigue as he investigates the death of his master, Corvinus, and pursued by agents that want to erase all knowledge of Corvinus’s work, Zethus discovers that the key to his master’s murder lies in the last project he had pursued before his death. Th e roots of this project lie deep in the past, at the origin of CrossTown’s fractured reality. Once he understands the stakes, Zethus must make the dangerous journey to the cradle of history. The price he must pay to find the answers he seeks will threaten everything he holds dear―including his own humanity.

CrossTown

Cooper, Loren W.

United States

Becoming a parent changes everything. Fear and love live together. Suddenly there is a person in the world for whom you want happiness and safety, even when those two don't always coincide. Diary of a Young Father comprises forty letter-poems written by award-winning film director Edoardo Ponti to his unborn child during the forty weeks of his wife’s pregnancy. These poems are gifts, lessons, slices of joy, maps for how we build a life, for how we work and learn, how we love, and how we remember.

Letters from a Young Father

Ponti, Edoardo

Poetry

Sister Rebel

Biographies & Memoirs

Bonpane, Theresa

Community & Culture

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