|summary=There are eighteen short stories covering the East Midlands, those parts of London you'd generally really rather avoid and rural East Anglia. You'll see broken families, revenge killings, prostitution and drugs. There's corruption – not unusual when you have an overstretched police force and underpaid men and women staffing it. And then there are the people who, in spite of everything, fight for justice.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548232</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ben Okri
|title=Tales of Freedom
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tales of Freedom is a book of two halves, with a short story entitled Comic Destiny taking up the majority of the book. Comic Destiny is made up of a series of short pieces that follow on from each other and are probably best described as being closer to prose poetry than anything else.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846041597</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jane Feaver
|title=Love Me Tender
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=A woman remembers her dead husband playing Love Me Tender (the song made famous by Elvis Presley) on his tenor horn. She is in a daze, feeling the grief of the bereaved widow she is, the betrayal of the deceived wife, and the guilt of having murdered him. The title story of this collection is all the more moving and startling because of its understated style, and what is not said as well as what is.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521288</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aravind Adiga
|title=Between the Assassinations
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=''Between the Assassinations'' is a collection of short stories set in the fictional South Indian town of Kittur, which is almost certainly Mangalore (where the Adiga grew up). But the plight of the residents can be found in any Indian city - which I imagine is Adiga's point of setting it in a fictional location. The twelve stories are vaguely interlinked (there are some recurring characters) but for the most part the stories stand alone. The time period is set between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, although like the location, the time period and the assassinations of the title have little bearing on the events themselves.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848871236</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Eagleman
|title=Sum: Tales from the Afterlives
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=For some reason I find myself unable to start this review. So I'll mention this book starts with the end, and see where we go from there. Of course, that's the key – this book does just that – starts with the end of our human life here on Earth (or wherever you happen to be reading this) and posits forty possibilities of what happens thereafter, in the hereafter. It's not so much 'Five People You Meet in Heaven' as 'Forty Heavens you Might Meet People In'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847674283</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Lasdun
|title=It's Beginning To Hurt
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=It's Beginning to Hurt is a collection of sixteen short stories, all bound together by the theme of hurt in various forms. It is James Lasdun's third collection of short stories and, chances are, if you are a fan of the short story then you will have read something by him before.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099512327</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrew Porter
|title=The Theory of Light and Matter
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=Both the book cover and its title are enticing, quirky, eye-catching. Personally, I'm a fan of most things American including American fiction, so I couldn't wait to start reading. I was not disappointed. Porter introduces us to characters, many of whom would probably be described as deeply flawed. He shares the darker side of modern-day American life with the reader - which is far from the bright lights of glitzy New York or the sun-drenched beaches of California. You could say that this is all about real life. To underline his point, Porter's characters are mostly local folks (to use a favourite American word) shuffling through life as best they can.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022408982X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Kelman
|title=If it is Your Life
|rating=3
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=''If This Is Your Life'' is not so much a collection of short stories as a collection of pieces of creative writing. Kelman doesn't really do 'stories'. In nineteen pieces of writing of varying length from just a single page to more lengthy pieces, such as the story that gives its title to this collection, Kelman writes (mostly) about people on the edge of society. He addresses issues such as class, politics, gender, age and ill health.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241142423</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Christopher Golden (Editor)
|title=Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead
|rating=5
|genre=Horror
|summary=Anyone who enjoys a good horror story and likes zombie films will love this book, which is a collection of nineteen short stories by a variety of authors. I have to admit that I have only heard of one of the authors before - [[:Category:Mike Carey|Mike Carey]], who writes the [[The Naming of the Beasts (Felix Castor) by Mike Carey|Felix Castor]] novels - but I am not an avid reader of the genre and don't doubt that the authors will be known to readers more familiar with it. Despite this unfamiliarity, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the stories, with just one or two seemingly not up to scratch.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0749952539</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Katie Fforde (Editor) and Sue Moorcroft (Editor)
|title=Loves Me, Loves Me Not
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=What a feast is presented in these forty stories from well-loved and prolific romantic authors, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Romantic Novelists' Association. In a Who's Who of the genre, there are writers from every age group, including one or two who might even have been founder members of the RNA, back in 1960. My advice is to sip through the stories slowly, rather than gobbling them up quickly and suffering from indigestion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0778303373</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephanie Tillotson
|title=Cut on the Bias
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=If ''Cut on the Bias'' is in your local bookshop, you will surely be won over by the feisty cover. Stories about women and their clothes are about identity, so what better start to a set of short stories than a fashion statement cover featuring the bags in which said clothes arrive home?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906784132</amazonuk>
}}