Four Tales

This entertaining and intriguing anthology offers everything a reader could want in a short story – narrative verve, a gift for characterisation, an often dark sense of humour and more than a hint of the fantastical – while the variety of situations and approaches displayed across the four stories showcases the author’s impressive versatility.

Frisbee: As innocent as he looks, Thomas already has blood on his hands by the age of seven. Who will he choose as his next victim, and will he find any redemption?

Taste the Rain: A little lonely but otherwise content with her life on the farm, our heroine isn’t looking forward to the long coach ride to London for some relative’s wedding. An unfortunate event lands her somewhere far worse than the capital, though, and it looks unlikely she will ever get home, let alone find love.

Lifechoice: Accomplished cross-country runner Karen has no interest in the new sports implant that guarantees to improve performance. But some of her fellow runners, including her new boyfriend Pete, rush to sign up. At first the implant delivers impressive results, but do these come, as Karen begins to believe, with some sinister side-effects?

Monster in the Wood: Having recently spent good money on a difficult horse, Sadie reluctantly relocates to Leeds. Enduring the monstrous behaviour of the girls who work in her new livery yard, she wonders whether to believe the locals’ talk of a real monster in the neighbourhood…

Falling Behind

Do you really know the person you have committed the rest of your life to? Are they the same person you married, once knew, or have you ignored those subtle changes and made compromises just for the sake of happily ever after? Perhaps it is you who has changed, and now everything you once cherished, once hoped for, does not bind you in the way that it once did.

Against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, Beth, and her husband Jake, travel to Samoa to reset and mend a broken marriage. But the suspicion of an affair, an addiction, a crime, or the thought that he just does not want to be around her anymore, travel with her to this island paradise.

How does it feel to lose a child? Your children are not supposed to leave you before you leave them. How do you live in a vacuum, unable to breathe, when sleep and inevitable death are the only reprieve? And then, what happens when you are responsible for their death? An old man and women, isolated from the rest of the world, abandoned by their families and neighbours, grapple with grief.

Falling Behind is a collection of six short stories that explores the character of grief and its manifestation in people and how these very same people attempt to ride it out and hope, at the same time, for it to end. As with Leaving Behind, each story bears an unexpected twist.

Events of an Ordinary Life

Events of an Ordinary Life is a collection of wide-ranging and wildly imaginative tales. The series is a mixture of fiction, supernatural fiction and true event stories that will keep you wanting more. You’ll find comedy, suspense and drama in a very enjoyable reading experience.

Epiphanies

Understanding life and its realities has always been difficult, not only for children but also for those who are considered as adults. Epiphanies is a collection of short stories that portrays challenges of life and illustrates how events can lead to some 'Aha' moments!

Dead Serious

Stanley was a skinny, timid child who dreaded school. Each Friday, his mum, Irene, would bribe him with a toy car, compelling him to attend the following week. She and his father, Pete, provided love and support, but their eldest son always remained anxious, with little self-esteem. Then, at the age of 10, a greater embarrassment caused him even more anxiety: his mother had bought him the wrong shirt for the football team he had joined with his friends.

Previously, the child had been happy to be invisible, allowing disappointment and others to take control of his life. This single incident made him determined to take charge. He had lots of friends, including Glyn and Roy, who would help him; perhaps they might even have some fun. His first test would be to stand in front of hundreds of boys when he took the school assembly.

Stan knew his struggles to change his life would be a long journey, but he was certain he could develop an inner strength and become more confident. He would no longer be 'short straw Stan' – he was ready to take control of his life.

Portrayed through separate, linked novellas, these tales of Stan's life from infancy through his teenage years may be read as one continuous novel. Alternatively, any chapter may be chosen from any novella and read as a short story.

Dead Plague

Warning: do not read this book if you are of a sensitive disposition!

Within this book lies a collection of short stories each different from the other but all connect with aspects of horror, suspense and survival, set within a post-apocalyptic world, where the dead have risen from an unknown viral outbreak, that abidingly seek the flesh of the remaining survivors.

The remaining humans attempt to find some semblance of a life on a reformed earth created by the dead. Each story depicts how the dead have reshaped the lives of the survivors and illustrates how they struggle to conform to the change while trying to hold onto some sanity and attempt to continue with life while pondering how long that life will be.

Day Return to Cocoa Yard

Day Return to Cocoa Yard is an anthology of sixteen novellas and short stories charting the journey of underdogs, whether they're children, adults, murderers or tragic lovers.

Crack and Other Short Stories

Four compelling and visceral tales – very different in their settings and characters, but alike in their vividness and intensity. 

Crack is about the narrator's peculiar encounter with a man he meets smoking crack-cocaine in a phone box. The Prototype is a send-up to late nineteenth-century gothic horror and tells the story of a woman's mayfly resurrection. Our Fathers takes place on the day after the UK EU referendum and it explores the impacts this event had on many people's personal lives. The final story, Etchings on a Stone Wall, is a surreal tale about four people imprisoned in a monolithic structure, who are taunted by the sunlight that shines down from above the wall.

Bart Lambert’s debut short story collection is an energetic and vibrant read, written in a style that is witty, suspenseful and sometimes even shocking.

Confessions

Maybe you were hit on the blind side of life, experiencing real discoveries, living off the sixes of a dice, trauma-gripped powering through, but holding on to something that just was not true.

Now there’s a dark light in you, it will walk the path of the master devil in situ, dark energy will pass through, with hell throwing spanner's in kind, simply to be rid of you.

Drafting a reality of your life with words, allergic to average, continuing to overthink the verbs, by practice of patience marking the tomorrows with your innovated verse.

How to battle a problem that has no rule? When did public entities become so cruel? This thought has spun so many views, but these days even Britain's finest don't have a clue, indecisive it remains, your patience must simply be insane.

Life is certainly not a problem to be solved, a toxic reality experienced will never go untold. Many vain attempts will be made to make you unfold, breaking into your reality, squeezed against the goodness of your halo soul.

Confessions by Zubair Mulla ponders over all this and more.

Collectanea Cygna

Collectanea Cygna is a collection of 25 short stories, ranging from humour to pathos, from fantasy to science fiction and time travel, and from love stories to tragedy. Each story is complete in itself. 

Travel back to the Second World War or forward to a virtual reality environment. Empathise with the loss of loved ones or rejoice in the finding of one’s true love. See inside the mind of a murderer or laugh at the antics of the newly retired. This book will take you on many journeys.

Cleaning Stories And Other Tails

Cleaning Stories And Other Tails is a broad sweep of mainly the underclass. Bread crumbs of prostitution, idyllic adoption and the mumblings of a white woman near an indigenous reserve make the reader ponder, lash out and albeit care for the various winners and losers that cross days and nights.

The characters drawn from a realm of healers, liars and ordinary Joes populate urban landscapes with self-deprecating wit, emotional shortcomings and identifiable crisis.

The first incarnation of this book was a rough sketch I did while working as a maid in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal, Quebec.

There have been many stained mattresses, unavailable rooms, and smoke-inhaled lobbies in the interim.

Christmas Stories 2

Christmas Stories 2 is another collection of ten short magical stories that focus on the parts of Christmas we all love and will take you to a place where time stands still. Each story has been thoughtfully hand-picked from a range of ideas with each tale carefully woven word by word to make Christmas Stories 2 a masterpiece.