Dream Angus comes to you at night and bestows dreams. Just the sight of him may be enough to make you lose your heart, for he is also the god of love, youth and beauty. In this mesmerising retelling of the Celtic myth, Alexander McCall Smith unites dream and reality, leaving us to wonder: what is life but the pursuit of dreams?...

Sophie, a twenty-something Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A., and Lola, a German immigrant who has settled in Hollywood, know that while Los Angeles is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal....

Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and businessman is alone in a hotel room, drinking whisky, fantasising about sex and contemplating suicide. As he tries to distance himself from reality, his lonely, alcohol-fuelled fantasies are interrupted by a flood of memories, reminding him of his own shortcomings....

There’s Grandaddy Jake Santee, 99 years old, an unreformed gambler, cranky reprobate and fierce opponent of the work ethic. Thanks to his home-distilled hooch, Ol’ Death Whisper, he reckons he’s in with good shot at immortality. And then there’s Tiny, adopted at the age of four by Grandaddy Jake, a giant young man as gentle as Jake is belligerent....

Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late fifties and early sixties....

This award-winning story collection summons all the laughter, darkness and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace....

There is no such thing as history, you see. It\"s a dream, perhaps even a dream of a dream… Walter Benjamin is dead. One of the most radiant minds of the twentieth century has been snatched away by death in a small town on the border between Spain and France....

Jesse and Lee share a house owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, where it rains in the hall. They move to cabins on the cliffs at Big Sur where the deafening croaks of frogs can be temporarily silenced by the cry, \"Campbell\"s Soup\"....

In the early fifteenth century, as winter falls away, the people of Albania know that their fate is sealed. They have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, and war is now inevitable. Soon enough dust kicked up by Turkish horses is spotted from a citadel....

After suffering a catastrophic breakdown, J.J. O’Malley volunteers for a government project exploring the possibility of using coma as a means to keep prisoners under control. Floating in a maintained coma on a prison ship off the west coast of Ireland, his coma goes viral and the nation turns to watch....

Condemned to shoulder the world forever by the gods he dared defy, freedom seems unattainable to Atlas. But then he receives an unexpected visit from Heracles, the one man strong enough to share the burden… Jeanette Winterson\"s retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles asks difficult and eternal questions about the nature of choice and coercion....

Thirteen-year-old Tom Curdie, the product of a Glasgow slum, is on probation for theft. His teachers admit that he is clever, but only one, Charlie Forbes, sees something in Tom and his seemingly insolent smile. So, Forbes decides to take Tom on holiday with his own family, with tragic consequences....

Named Wales’s Greatest Novel This outstanding novel tells of one boy’s journey into the grown-up world. By the light of a full moon our narrator and his friends Huw and Moi witness a side to their Welsh village life that they had no idea existed, and their innocence is exchanged for the shocking reality of the adult world....

When David Thomson took a journey to the sea coasts of Scotland and Ireland to seek out the legend of the selchies - mythological creatures who transform from seals into humans - a magical world emerged. Men were rescued by seals in stormy seas, took seal-women for their wives and had their children suckled by seal-mothers....

Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Millstone is a radical celebration of the mother-child relationship. It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way....