Jenn Ashworth

One ordinary morning, after 15 years of marriage, Laurie's husband Mark vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, Laurie covers up his disappearance and carries on working as a cleaner at the local university, visiting the father she was estranged from for 15 years who now has dementia, and drinking industrial quantities of cheap wine. When she finally reports him as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? This is just one of the questions this intriguing novel poses. Why did the normally peaceable Mark get into a fight at work and lose his job? What made Laurie fall out with the woman in the flat above, one of her few friends? Why didn't she speak to her father for such a long time? Is she right to be suspicious about the carer who seems to have taken over his life and what has any of this got to do with a years old murder of a local child? And is Mark dead or alive?

A Love Story

Ghosted

Neil Gaiman

Kelly Link

E. F. Benson

E. Nesbit

Louis de Bernières

Robert Aickman

M. R. James

Jerome K. Jerome

L. P. Hartley

Frank Copwer

Benard Capes

Muriel Sparks

A present contains a monstrous secret. An uninvited guest haunts a Christmas party. A shadow slips across the floor by firelight. A festive entertainment ends in darkness and screams. Who knows what haunts the night at the dark point of the year? This collection of seasonal chillers looks beneath Christmas cheer to a world of ghosts and horrors, mixing terrifying modern fiction with classic stories by masters of the macabre. From Neil Gaiman and M. R. James to Muriel Spark and E. Nesbit, there are stories here to make the hardiest soul quail - so find a comfy chair, lock the door, ignore the cold breath on your neck and get ready to welcome in the real spirits of Christmas.

A chilling collection of modern and classic Christmas ghost stories

Ghosts of Christmas Past

Richard V. Hirst

The Night Visitors

A haunting, mysterious tale imbued with the force of myth, by the award-winning author of A Kind of Intimacy. When Annette Clifford returns to her childhood home on the edge of Morecambe Bay, she despairs: the long-empty house is crumbling, undermined by two voracious sycamores. What she doesn't realise is that she's not alone: her arrival has woken the spirits of her parents, who anxiously watch over her, longing to make amends. Because as the past comes back to Jack and Netty, they begin to see the summer of 1963 clearly, when Netty was desperately ill and a stranger moved in. Charismatic, mercurial Timothy Richardson, with his seemingly miraculous powers of healing, who drew all their attention away from Annette... Now, they must try to draw another stranger towards her, one who can rescue her. Blurring the boundaries between the corporeal and spirit worlds and subtly echoing the myth of Baucis and Philemon, this is an eerily beautiful, evocative and highly original novel, which underlines the eternal potency of hope.

Fell

A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing. Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood. Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic journey through familiar landscapes transformed through unexpected encounters and comic combinations. The everyday provides the ground for the macabre and the absurd, as the narration twists and stretches time. Hovering on the edge of madness, writing, it seems, might keep us sane—or might just allow us to keep on living. In Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth calls for a redefinition of the creative work of thinking, writing, teaching, and being, and she underlines the necessity of a fearlessly compassionate and empathic attention to vulnerability and fragility.

Notes Made While Falling

Annie moves into her new home bringing little else but her cat and a collection of cow-shaped milk jugs. She's hoping for a clean slate, but there is something familiar about her next door neighbour - she's convinced she's seen him somewhere before. Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful. She narrates her own increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, to learn from past mistakes and achieve a 'certain kind of intimacy' with the boy next door. Undeterred by her target's hostile girlfriend, she searches for guidance, obsessively studying self-help literature and romance novels. Though Annie struggles to repress a murky history of violence, secrets and sexual mishaps her past is never too far behind her, finally shattering her denial in a compelling and bloody climax. A Kind of Intimacy traces the dark possibilities of best intentions going awry and gives an unsettling glimpse into a clumsy young woman who has too much in common with the rest of us to be written off as a monster.

A Kind of Intimacy

Cold light

Tehlikeli Yakýnlaþma

I’m sitting on my couch, watching the local news. There’s Chloe’s parents, the mayor, the hangers on, all grouped round the pond for the ceremony. It’s ten years since Chloe and Carl drowned. You can tell from their faces that something has gone wrong. But I’m the one who knows straightaway that the mayor has found a body. And I know who it is. Jenn Ashworth’s gripping and unforgettable Cold Light is the story of a friendship unsettling in its intensity and of one terrible summer when lies, secrets, jealousy, and perversion result in tragedy more twisted and evil than one unsuspecting community can handle. A dark tale with a surreal edge, it follows two fourteen-year-old girls, best friends, as they confront the dangers of a predatory adult world, where truth is cruelly sacrificed in the name of innocence.

A Novel

Cold Light

Muriel Spark

Bernard Capes

Frank Cowper

Anna Bailey

Kerry Andrew

Vanessa Onwuemezi

Saba Sams

A woman, exhausted by work and motherhood, hires the services of a sinister firm that promises her a brand-new life… Journeying across America to make a claim to an inheritance, a man must confront the shame and bigotry that has haunted his family for generations… A picture-perfect holiday threatens to unravel as two daughters come to terms with the uneasy dynamic of their new blended family… The stories shortlisted for the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University take readers on a journey through uncertain terrain: times and places at once familiar yet deeply unsettling. From the queer love story playing out against a desolate and disease-ravaged landscape, to a man’s earnest hunt for the killer of a boy who died in his arms, these stories are about outsiders, who seek safety and security in worlds that are chaotic, unfathomable, sometimes beautiful, and often brutal. AUTHORS: Saba Sams, Kerry Andrew, Jenn Ashworth, Anna Bailey and Vanessa Onwuemezi.

The BBC National Short Story Award 2022

Benjamin Webster

Original tales by remarkable writers Hometown Tales is a series of books pairing exciting new voices with some of the most talented and important writers at work today. Some of the tales are fiction and some are narrative non-fiction - they are all powerful, fascinating and moving, and aim to celebrate regional diversity and explore the meaning of home. In these pages on Lancashire, you'll find two unique tales. 'After the Funeral, the Crawl' is an arresting portrait of a couple forced to confront a dark secret over the course of a pub crawl one night in Preston, by award-winning novelist Jenn Ashworth. 'JUDAS!' is a vivid, coming-of-age story that traces the political and cultural history of Manchester, from its industrial past to its eventual separation from the county, by Benjamin Webster.

Hometown Tales: Lancashire

Kind of Intimacy

A young British writer makes her American debut with a disturbing psychological thriller reminiscent of the works of Tana French, Kate Atkinson, and Laura Lippman about the devastating repercussions of secrets between friends in a small English town.

“Extremely intense and powerfully intriguing.” —Waterstone’s “[Ashworth] Evokes a damaged mind with the empathy and confidence of Ruth Rendell.” —The Times (London) Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth is a hauntingly beautiful and shocking psychological thriller in the vein of the bestselling novels of Tana French—a darkly compelling story of secrets between two teenage friends in a small English town. Ashworth already has created great buzz in the U.K. thanks to her stunning debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, winner of the prestigious Betty Trask Award, and now Cold Light places her in elite literary company—alongside Laura Lippman, Kate Atkinson, and other acclaimed masters of intelligent, emotionally powerful mystery and suspense. An unforgettable tale of friendship and memory—and the shattering truth behind a forgotten dead body newly unearthed—Cold Light is a most welcome addition to the crime fiction and thriller ranks.

It's Friday in the Leeke household, but this is no ordinary Friday and the Leekes are a little unusual: they are Lancastrian Mormons, and this evening their son Gary will return from 2 years as a missionary in Salt Lake City. His mother is planning a celebratory dinner - with difficulty, since she's virtually housebound with an undiagnosed, embarrassing condition. What she doesn't realise is that the rest of the family - her meek husband, disturbed oldest son, and teenage daughter - have other plans for the evening, each involving drastic and irrevocable action. As the narrative baton passes from one Leeke to the next, disaster inexorably looms. Except that nothing goes according to plan, and the outcome is as unexpected as it is shocking. Giving a fascinating insight into the Mormon way of life, this blackly funny tale of innocence betrayed shows the havoc religion can wreak.

Jenn Ashworth

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