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.

Book Seller

This book is meant as an anthology of minimalist short stories that I have published throughout the time in literary magazines, using a minimum of means to create the artistic background. In terms of style, I could mention Jack London, J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, as authors that influenced my career as a writer. Though seemingly simple, the short stories in Book Seller are carefully crafted, like exquisite pieces of jewellery and each, in turn, can represent the appropriate starting point for other challenging books. I let my characters speak for myself and give a decisive role to suggestion. This leads to a lyrical outline of the events, described as if my characters sometimes dress themselves in poetry from time to time. A moment in the existence of a character, a snippet of a moment, a coincidence, may be enough to make the beginning of a novel or the beginning of a short story similar to those found in this book.

Bocconcini

Bocconcini, a cornucopia of stories, a horn of plenty: youth, art, love, life, Ireland, Italy, Thailand, the macabre, the forbidden, age, and much else. 150 dives into other worlds, other moments, emotions recollected in tranquillity. Points of departure, reflection, possibly even action. New insights into the familiar, a new friend warranting a place among earlier friends.

Between Friends

Between Friends explores, in thirty-six texts, friendship in the modern world across a range of scenarios. Several texts investigate the special nature of male sporting affinities while others reveal the pleasures and disappointments of friendships with literary writers. The collection’s concern with the neuroses of masculinity is evident in ten vignettes devoted to male clothing, bodily adornment or sports equipment. The last six stories, mostly based on archival photographs, imagine scenarios of extreme male anguish or difficulty.

Overall the collection is a provocative psychological study of sometimes unconventional relationships which takes readers to a new level of understanding of the bonds between individuals. A particular strength of the work is its vivid powers of evocation – of scenarios, events and relationships – and its witty and often humorous expression of the significance of the situations recounted. Ranging over a wide spectrum of social and sporting subjects and interactions – from boxing to fashion, from the gym to home situation, from war to peace, from exotic places to familiar environments – the stories’ varied styles and forms aim to capture the particular flavour of the experiences recounted.

An Element of Mystery

An Element of Mystery combines complex human emotions along with ghosts and mysteries of Egypt that come together in one compilation of stories and poetry.

An array of poems that delve into the mysteries of emotions – anger, depression, anxiety and loss – as well as what the stars can hold and the journey of a waterdrop, examining them in a unique style that will allow you to begin to understand some of the complex ideas around them.

Allow yourself to be transported to the wonders of Egypt in The Pharaoh’s Curse. Feel the terror of awakening on a ship that you have no recollection of getting onboard in Pressganged into the Navy. Finally, follow Henry as he collects the clues that will guide him to his lost fortune in The Mystery of the Red Diamond.

An Element of Mystery will help you question how you see the mysteries of Life.

All the Young Dudes

Question: What do you get when you cross a not-so-lovable rogue with an uptight lawyer and throw a little Elvis into the mix?

Answer: A thoroughly ripping page-turner of a yarn and a permanent residency in Heartbreak Hotel. Ellie Russell could certainly be forgiven for thinking somebody up there doesn’t like her. Laugh with her, cry with her – be very glad you’re not her!

A Tale from All My Sisters

The seventy-two individual short stories in the book are based on the tales of seventy-two real women. 

These tales are a reflection of the diverse lives and dilemmas that many women all over the world today face, and the inner strength that women can have to overcome adversity. 

The book begins with a story of a woman who leaves everything she has behind and takes the leap of faith in moving to England in the early 1960s. It then follows different women, covering issues such as homelessness, cancer, adoption, death, motherhood and transgender. It highlights the reality that age, race, religion and class are not the only difficulties that women all over the world encounter.