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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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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‘Witches sail in eggshells,’ I heard Meg say from behind me, and I looked back. She was pounding the shells, hard, with the palm of her hand on the flat of a knife.

Bewitched by ‘the sort of girl who’d batter your heart like a thrush with a snail on a stone’, a woman overlooks the one who really loves her.

A seaside community is overwhelmed when the sea begins to expel its life forms. But the villagers would rather raise the sea wall, whatever the cost, than confront their past mistakes.

A woman’s beloved garden withers as the baby inside her flourishes. When the pregnancy reaches its end, the progeny is not as she expects.

A widower feels like his life might have been a quiet nothing, but he’ll end it with the flight he’s always dreamed of. Even that fails, but instead of indignity, in the attempt he finds peace.

Perceptive, intriguing, and beautifully told, Chloe Turner’s debut collection explores the themes of love, loss, the little ways we let each other down, and how we can find each other again.

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