|summary=How would you subvert a fairy tale? You know enough of them and enough about them to do it, so think on it. Would you give a mermaid a smartphone? Would you pepper them with pop stars, and perhaps let them be witness to the Schadenfreude caused by a cave that's sacred to native Canadians? Would you, in the light of their characters usually being routine, interchangeable tropes, give them a closely-observed personality – as seen here in a teacher's interior thoughts when faced with a piece of East Anglian lore? Would you take the exoticism of the east, and Egypt in particular, and see it in the light of a musical teacher on a zero-hours contract who ends up muttering to himself, directing traffic in the middle of the road, or from the remove of an elderly man with ''swollen feet in orthopaedic sandals'' with a message from the past? Certainly these two are not the standard Arabian Nights-styled pieces…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784630381</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Rose Tremain
|title= The American Lover
|rating= 5
|genre= Short Stories
|summary= Having never read a Rose Tremain book before, I was interested to start this collection of short stories. I wasn't disappointed, and it quickly became clear why she has won so many literary awards for her work.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548445</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Ursula K Le Guin
|title= The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose
|rating= 4
|genre= Science Fiction
|summary=I'll start by saying that I think the SF Masterworks series are pretty much always and without fail a really interesting read. I've bought quite a few from this publisher now and I find they will always pick interesting titles from the science fiction genre, making them a great place to start if you are either just dipping your toe into science fiction for the first time or if you're looking to build up your collection.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>147320576X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Maeve Binchy
|title= A Few of the Girls
|rating= 5
|genre= Short Stories
|summary= I was excited about reviewing a brand new collection of Maeve Binchy short stories and I wasn't disappointed. As her widower states in the introduction, Binchy had an extraordinary talent for telling powerful and compassionate stories, and was a true storyteller with an amazing output.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1409161412</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ann Cleeves (editor)
|title=The Starlings and Other Stories
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Six authors, known collectively as 'The Murder Squad', and their six accomplices were given twelve photographs of the remote landscape of Pembrokeshire by acclaimed photographer David Wilson and asked to come up with a short story inspired by what they saw. Some of the stories will be more to your taste than others, as is only to be expected in such a varied anthology, but none are weak and if you enjoy crime short stories then this book could be a real treat.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1909823740</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Walter M Miller Jr
|title= Dark Benediction
|rating= 5
|genre= Science Fiction
|summary= Walter M. Miller Jr is rightly placed among the science fiction giants H.G. Wells, Michael Moorcock, and Philip K. Dick in the ''Masterworks'' series, a large selection of genre-defining writers and works at the centre of what is now such a popular and diverse range of literatures, films, and television productions. Miller is considered one of the finest science fiction writers of the 1950s, and in ''Dark Benediction'', fourteen of this author's best short stories are brought together in one collection.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1473211948</amazonuk>
}}
