Capital Vices is a story collection like no other. Dark, disturbing, wild and comic. An exhilarating joyride in the splendid company of outlaws, chancers, rogues and vagabonds.

Praise for Capital Vices

Conor Montague is a fearless writer with an uncanny ability to take the reader further, faster. Fierce, poetic, innovative and often very funny. This collection has it all; the depths and the darkness, as well as images that ring clear as a bell and linger. A brilliant body of work.
—Jess Kidd, author of The Night Ship

Flan O’Brien meets Hunter S – Fear and Loathing in Ballinasloe and beyond. Montague’s wild book is akin to strapping yourself onto a rollercoaster that snakes around three continents, and just when you are upside down and crying for mercy, you swerve off to a different place, moved by characters rarely written about in Irish fiction. Brilliantly written with a natural ear for dialogue and a deep love for those unrooted headcases who wander the globe open to adventure. From the dark institutions of Ireland they take on the world and grab life bare handed, as if it were the throat of a cobra slithering into your jail cell.
—Emer Martin, author of Thirsty Ghosts

Montague writes with a direct, visceral poetry and this whole collection is the work of a born storyteller.
—Mike McCormack, author of Solar Bones

Conor Montague writes neon draped prose, characters caught, lost, or living entranced in a smelter of realities. His words conjure a misfit’s vision, a child’s delight, a killer’s desperate play-land. Akin to Henry Miller, Conor Montague writes of ‘lost souls downtown’ and the constant lurking yearn for lives other than our own.
—Órfhlaith Foyle, author of Three Houses in Rome

The characters in Capital Vices are tightly wound and on edge in Montague’s intense visceral dramas. Montague has the ear of a dramatist — acute to the darkly funny sounds of people trying to talk their way out of trouble. Both lyrical and absurd, Montague’s stories are a joy to read.
—Martina Evans, author of American Mules

With Capital Vices Montague has created a memorable cast of characters; errant, wayward, misplaced, and all the time scavenging for their place in the scheme of things. A collection replete with whiskey wisdom; ache and edge; heart and humour; vigour and poignancy, the swish and bluster of life.
—Alan McMonagle, author of Laura Cassidy’s Walk of Fame

A roller coaster ride through time, from Ireland to India with a stopover in Disney World. Montague’s stories are packed to the brim with craic and cringe in equal measure. Written in technicolour, an ensemble cast of characters are all tested to the limit with unexpected results. This magical blend of flash fiction and short stories is fresh and inventive, I laughed out loud and cried in turn.
—Aoibheann McCann, author of Marina

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On a small Scottish island, a woman believes that her dead husband has come back to her as a dog. In the suburbs of a city, a judge is haunted by the shade of a man he has recently sent to prison. On a remote caravan site, a group of strangers prepare for the end of the world.

These stories uncover the uncanny and the mysterious within everyday life. Moving from Scottish towns and cities to wild highland landscapes, The Dog Husband explores the boggy ground between reason and unreason, playing with questions of superstition, faith, madness and desire.

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The Peculiarities of Yearning is a collection of short fiction of various lengths and genres that is pulled together by a thread of exploration of what it means to yearn: to long for, suppress, and ultimately allow what matters to emerge and be acted on – thus reflecting the journey of psychotherapy.

Praise for The Peculiarities of Yearning

Carty dives deep in her stories. The stories are a tightrope of psychology and its impact on the body. In sharp prose, girls live in a world without red, natural laws transform, the dead are preserved, DNA disobeys, babies are kept in stasis. Dark, astute and always surprising, this is utterly fascinating writing. Yearning has never been so good.
—Angela Readman, author of Don’t Try This at Home and Something like Breathing

Carty’s beguiling and lyrical prose is displayed perfectly in this inventive and varied collection that runs the gamut of human emotions. Shocking, witty, sad and funny, these are stories that show humanity at its best and worst.
—Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Dead Relatives and Water Will Refuse Them

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"Some homeschool days, the lounge is a sea, stairs a snowcapped mountain, bathroom a jungle, Mum and Dad’s bedroom a sun-seared dessert…"

The stories in The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain speak of togetherness and separation: how we strive to connect with that one person who could save us, and how we attempt to save the people who most matter to us.

Discover the lost, the self-conscious, the reckless. Learn how to milk an alpaca. Encounter a river with one thing on its mind. Touch on moments of isolation amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Find out how a ghost tree could bring a community together. Witness the moment when friendship sparks into something more. Consume a life in one mouthful. Meet the lovers, the families and the undefinable others who make up these worlds and sweep us along.

Darley has a beguiling and distinct voice; her writing is never less than beautiful. A captivating collection.
—Amanda Huggins, author of Crossing the Lines and All Our Squandered Beauty

Beautifully written and frequently surprising, this book is a wonderful read for these unusual and uncertain times.
—Gaynor Jones, author of Among These Animals

There’s so much loveliness in Darley’s collection, often in the most unexpected places. In every way, this is a collection for all the senses to savour.
—Fiona J Mackintosh, author of The Yet Unknowing World

This wise and tender collection, steeped in nature and human nature, is a balm for an aching soul. Rich and diverse, deep but accessible, this dark forest of stories is endlessly dappled with intelligence, empathy, wit, kindness, and hope.
—Tom O’Brien, author of Straw Gods

Darley’s dexterous writing converges with the often intangible complexities when connecting to self, other, and the environment. This extraordinary collection provokes us to engage with each of our senses simultaneously so that we may float untethered...
—Iona Winter, author of Gaps in the Light and then the wind came

I will revisit these stories again and again because their surreal and exquisite evocation of the everyday really made me think.
—Jan Kaneen, author of The Naming of Bones

Judy Darley asks what it is to be alive today, in this world, right now, in a way that constantly surprises, informs and excites.
—Alison Woodhouse, author of The House on the Corner and Family Frames

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Longlisted for the 2022 Edge Hill Prize.

‘The mapmakers work late in the closed room, conjuring from ink and skin new worlds neither will ever see.’

The Map Waits explores those moments when what will happen as we move forward remains unknown and uncharted. A besieged zookeeper awaits his fate; a magician’s assistant performs her own vanishing act; a photographer refuses the shot of a lifetime: these rich miniatures capture turning points deep in the heart. Characters realise a secret or deny a truth. Some overturn imposed stories of how they should live; others refuse to acknowledge a choice they have made. New lives are welcomed, losses are mourned. Long-buried memories erupt, new journeys begin.

Where will these stories take you?

Praise for The Map Waits

The Map Waits by Sharon Telfer is simply a stunning collection. This is a writer who knows her people, knows their struggles and heartaches, the dreams they hold dear. There's generational pain in these stories. There's loss, too, and the ravages of war, but also an abundance of grit and courage and joy. Telfer's prose is rich and precise, evocative and lyrical. A profoundly moving, incandescent debut from a truly gifted writer.
—Kathy Fish, Wild Life: Collected Works

Sharon Telfer has been one of my favourite flash fiction writers for a number of years, so I’ve been eagerly anticipating her debut collection. It has been well worth the wait; The Map Waits didn’t just exceed my expectations, it blew them away.

With just a few brushstrokes, Sharon creates world after world after world that pull you in and makes you want to slow ... down ... to ... absorb. absolutely. everything. She’s an artist who paints with nuance, perfectly balancing what’s on the page with what’s implied.

There are no weak links in this collection that builds to more than the sum of its parts. Sharon’s writing is sharp, scrupulous and striking. There is magic between these lines, and poetry inside them.
—Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Co-Director, National Flash Fiction Day (UK)

The Map Waits, Sharon Telfer’s debut collection of contemporary and historical short fictions, is poignant and profound. As well as working as compelling whole pieces, her stories are brilliantly composed at the sentence level — she has such an exact command of language and rhythm. The stories illustrate everything that is best about short form prose and have much to say about all aspects of humanity past and present. Highly recommended.
—Jude Higgins, The Chemist’s House

The Map Waits is full of wonder and wisdom; the stories are lush, deep, and crafted, and Sharon Telfer manages to bring sincerity and sensitivity to every line she writes. A truly beautiful collection.
—Nuala O’Connor, Birdie

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Longlisted for the 2022 Edge Hill Prize.

Human Terrain. The Army acknowledges, through the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, that human geography is as important as any satellite map.

Human Terrain deals with female voices and working-class existences, ordinary lives transformed by loss and love. There’s the mother working as cutman for her daughter in the boxing ring; the family who find themselves abandoned at the seaside; the gardener digging for love among the grass cuttings and weeds. Characters standing in a classroom, drinking in a pub, working the fryer in a fish and chip shop, or finding love in an ice warehouse, they all inhabit the collection. Stories full of dark humour and deep tenderness that depict the characters’ struggles to understand their place in the world.

Praise for Human Terrain

In Emily Bullock’s mystical collection, loss is evident. Life, thwarted dreams, family and its bonding and breaking, addictions, sins, despair.

These are stories told through beautiful, emotional writing that veers between the mystical and the ordinary, the lyrical and the raw, the profane and the infinite.

This is definitely one of the finest collections of the year and I can’t wait to explore Emily Bullock’s work.
—Amalia Gkavea, The Opinionated Reader

Here is a writer who has harnessed, embraced and extended the human spirit in multitude ways, harnessing each story's energy and going where it might take her.

Diversity and adversity run through this collection like welcome silver threads. We witness self destruction and self awareness in equal measure, but we are invited to view them through a three dimensional, empathetic lens.

This is a sparkling collection with humanity at it’s heart. Beautifully balanced and constructed, it is a perfect short story collection.
—Bookbound

Praise for Emily Bullock

Startlingly original and poetic – Bullock combines horror and brutality with unexpected moments of tenderness.
—The Observer, on Inside the Beautiful Inside

The backdrop of postwar London is splendidly done - all crusted soot and swirling fog - and the boxing scenes have a terrific vigour and excitement.
—The Times, on The Longest Fight

Emily Bullock’s debut, The Longest Fight, [is] a fine addition to the canon of boxing literature… And Bullock too, is alert to boxing’s nobility, as well as its barbarity, in this grittily impressive first novel.
—Independent on Sunday, on The Longest Fight

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The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing is a flash fiction collection that explores the fragility of human relationships and those unexpected meetings and moments that upend our familiar worlds. In her debut collection, Hannah Storm takes us to far-off countries and cultures, offering the reader a glimpse of the stories behind easily forgotten headlines, blending them with myth and magic. It is here that we meet characters often pushed to the extreme, who remind us that we are all still animals – driven by instinct and a need for protection. Woven throughout are the frequently difficult dynamics that disempower and define women and which transcend distance and cultures. From this emerges an exploration of place and safety: how those environments we may fear as most hostile can bring us the greatest peace, while those that should promise comfort engender precisely the opposite.

Praise for The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing

Hannah Storm performs powerful storytelling magic in this stunning debut. These emotionally gripping stories span the globe, peek into far-flung corners, inhabit dark roads and sunburnt tarmacs. They show us war-weary innocents, displaced seekers, imperfect lovers, mothers and children and outsiders, all longing for something like home. Storm's vision here is as aimed and searing as it is compassionate and wise. A breathtaking wonder, The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing is not to be missed.
—Kathy Fish, Wild Life: Collected Works

An unbeatable combination of courage and talent. Respect.
—Vanessa Gebbie, The Coward's Tale

Powerful writing as strong and inspiring as the writer. Hannah Storm’s short stories about little moments reveal far bigger truths about a wider, often wicked, world. They shock, they soothe; her exquisite script and extraordinary strength will keep you looking for more.
—Lyse Doucet, BBC Chief International Correspondent

Hannah Storm’s bold, brilliant writing is international in scope, digging deep into our personal geographies, a fraught territory of experiences that connect us and make us human.
—Michael Loveday, Three Men on the Edge

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The thirty-three flash fictions of Love Stories for Hectic People explore the alignment of beings that is love. There is love that is vulgar, love that knows no reason; there is love that cradles the act of living, love that springs through the cracks; love that is slaughtered. These tales take place from Italy to Ghana to Greece and London and Tokyo, in grainy cities and muted hotel rooms; there is a Mafia murder, an ambulance rescue worker and a woman whose husband falls off a mountain. There is unchaste attraction and slippery, nuanced love; police violence and porn, and fishing too.

Praise for Love Stories for Hectic People

I rarely receive a review copy, sit right down and read most of it in one sitting. Catherine McNamara's Love Stories for Hectic People had me doing that. It's a beguiling collection of flash fiction - the author's third - that's as briskly inventive and various as the form demands, embracing sensuality and ugliness in equal measure, and darting from one international encounter to another. Love lies at the heart of the matter, each time round, but grief and brutality are there, too.'The country where he was born had scorched hills and quixotic animals and wise elders with spectacularly gnarled toes...'
—Michael Caines, Brixton Review of Books

Like a raconteur in a lamplit Venetian bar, McNamara understands the charm and architecture of a tale. These structurally compressed fictions still cover significant ground as one consequence topples like a domino into the next, and conflicts modulate between forms. Yet, unlike a bar-room raconteur, McNamara rarely offers us easy resolutions. Her characters wrestle through their cosmopolitan situations, while lust, violence, and repulsion simmer in the midst of romance, sensuality, and intimacy. Love Stories for Hectic People is that rare thing – a book that gets better with each re-reading. McNamara has produced, in these stylish modern fables, a sophisticated study of relationships. She holds up an ornate mirror flecked with shadows.
—Michael Loveday, Three Men on the Edge

Catherine McNamara is one of the best writers I’ve read in all the time I've been in publishing. She can do more in two hundred words than most writers can do in two hundred pages. By turns real, funny, dark, magic, ugly, and beautiful. This collection rocks.
—Christopher James, Jellyfish Review

Seductive love, evaporating love and sometimes ‘increasingly superb’ love: it's all in these pages. Sharp, witty and deeply real, these small stories reveal moments of connections, and sometimes dissolution. One can't help but be captivated by these many and varied truths, as examined by Catherine McNamara – and the conclusion, despite the darkness, that ‘Love Is an Infinite Victory’.
—Michelle Elvy, the everrumble

Sometimes quiet and reflective, sometimes sensual and visceral, these thirty-three short pieces are assured meditations on the foibles and complexities of love – the making and unmaking of it. This collection drifts across continents and cultures, slowly unbuttoning aspects of relationships between an eclectic cast of characters, and the places they find themselves.
—K.M. Elkes, All That Is Between Us

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Families and Other Natural Disasters is a collection of flash fiction about families, born into, created or found, how they support us or repress us, and the ways they can change us and shape us.

These stories are set in the UK and India, in aquariums, ballrooms and outer space. They follow women into volcanoes and out to sea. The characters search for lost brothers and lost selves and find prairie dogs and sea serpents.

In a debut collection rich in cultural detail, Anita Goveas beautifully explores the theme of family as one of the essential elements that hold the universe together.

Narratives that intersect continents, myths and folklore – a magical exploration of love, belief and the complications in relationships, with others and with oneself. Left me breathless and craving for more.
—Susmita Bhattacharya, author of The Normal State of Mind and Table Manners

This gorgeous collection brims with energy and sensuality. The characters negotiate their uncertain way through a world where the rituals of family are as elemental as volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes; where gods, demons and monsters take a place alongside grandmothers, uncles and lost twins. Richly observed stories to catch the heart and quicken the pulse.
—Sharon Telfer, two-time winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award

Familial bonds are explored, stretched and transfigured into startling new forms in this collection. From the regional to the international to even the intersteller, there is both a directness and a sense of mystery in all of these stories. Subjects include volcanoes, tsunamis, zoos, sailing, dancing, falling in and out of love, and finding acceptance, and the prose throbs with sensory details and an elemental power. Varied and inventive in terms of character, cultural details and structure, this is a welcome and deeply satisfying debut.
—Farhana Khalique, Word Factory Apprentice and editor at Desi Reads

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Features 'The Calm', longlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Writing.ie Short Story of the Year 2020.

Some Days Are Better Than Ours is a startling collection that explores human life in all its forms. These stories will make you draw breath as you race through compelling accounts of the dark places people escape to and from.

Through her masterful use of language, Barbara Byar skilfully invites the reader into imagined futures and regretful pasts – from war to childhood to road trips to relationships. Her pieces are visceral, sometimes brutal but sliced through with hope. These stories, and the characters in them, strike straight at the realist heart of the human experience and will linger long after reading.

A must-read collection These stories stopped me in my tracks.
—Gaynor Jones, Northern Writer of the Year

These are searingly truthful fictions. Pitched at the border of poetry and prose, they catalogue lives lived at the edge, survivors facing the beauty and cruelty of the world. These fictions will take your breath away.
—William Wall, author of Suzy Suzy and Grace’s Day

Betrayal and brokenheartedness, sex and sadness, disaster and divorce – in Some Days Are Better Than Ours: A Collection of Tragedies, the wants and wounds of Byar's characters are stark, startling, and unforgettable.
—Meg Pillow, 2019 Wigleaf top 50

Barbara Byar writes flash like no one else; in each of these lucid and furious twenty-nine stories — some no longer than a single page — are wholly unforgettable glimpses into the lives of her individual characters.
—Peter Jordan, author of Calls to Distant Places

Some Days Are Better Than Ours delves into lives misshapen by abuse, exploring the dark side of the will and the flaring of lost souls. Byar’s language is gritty with rage, giving a lucid voice to the vulnerable, the marginalised, the roughshod, all fighting for what has been stolen and squandered, and looking for love between the cracks.
—Catherine McNamara, author of The Cartography of Others

Some Days Are Better Than Ours is an incredibly well-written and emotionally complex journey to the dark places of human experience. Clever, introspective and fearless, this collection will take you to places you never imagined before. A raw and relentless debut collection.
—Anita Goveas, author of Families and Other Natural Disasters (forthcoming, Reflex Press)

Barbara Byar’s Some Days Are Better Than Ours is a collection of flash fictions that dig deep into trauma, tapping into a well of strong emotions. You won’t be able to forget these hard-hitting stories very soon.
—Sophie van Llewyn, author of Bottled Goods, longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

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