|summary=I am always thrilled to see that Helen Simpson has brought out a new book. I am a big fan of her crisp, funny, observant short stories. So I picked up 'In Flight Entertainment' with some anticipation. I was not disappointed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099546124</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John E Flannery
|title=Toby's Little Eden
|rating=3.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=John E Flannery's debut collection contains four short stories (although one is more of a novella) and a series of amusing sketches about the ground staff at a new Golf Course in north Manchester. They're more varied than they might appear at first glance and demonstrate Flannery's ability to get straight to the heart of the story without wasting words and to develop character as economically as possible, whilst still holding the reader's imagination. I knew as soon as I began ''The Ghostwriter'' that I wasn't going to be disappointed as a man who has written successful thrillers is possessed by the spirit of Charles Dickens. It's a neat riff on John Braine's idea that novelist wait for an idea to descend on them and Graham Greene's belief that novelists are like mediums.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445777940</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dorothy Parker
|title=The Sexes
|rating=5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=From the young woman who examined her handkerchief in minute detail, to the soldier's leave which didn't live up to expectation, through the thoughts of the early hours of the morning to the actress who proved a disappointment to her fan and on to the glorious culmination of the child who should never have been called Lolita we have five wonderful short stories. They're in a book that's no bigger than most short stories but buy it and it could well be the best buy that you make this year.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>014119619X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aidan Chambers
|title=The Kissing Game
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=You don't see that many short story collections in YA circles. But when they do appear, you often wonder why there aren't more of them. And this is absolutely the case with The Kissing Game. Ranging from short pieces of flash fiction to "proper" short stories, each one will incite, surprise and stimulate.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0370331974</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Styron
|title=The Suicide Run
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=A WW2 naval soldier, guarding a prison island for those found guilty at courtmartials, is forced to wonder if he is winning his own battles against those arriving and leaving. A soldier remembers calming memories, and those causing tension, as he rests up before action. And for a highly-charged young man, there may be too much risk to be found in his high-octane downtime.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099532220</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Saunders
|title=The Vernham Chronicles
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=Set amidst the rolling British countryside around Vernbury Vale is the little village of Vernham. Anyone who lives in a village will recognise it immediately, with its cobbled streets and Tudor buildings. There was some damage during the war (which might, or might not have been down to a lighthouse folly constructed by a local landowner on his lake) but the gaps have been filled with some beautiful, er, mock Tudor buildings. Almost unique and nearly beautiful as the village is, it's not the star of The Vernham Chronicles. The stars are the people who live in Vernham.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907499598</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John H Watson, Tony Reynolds and Chris Coady
|title=The Lost Stories of Sherlock Holmes
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=It is a truth universally acknowledged that a successful detective character will have far too many cases in his career for it to be at all realistic. The worst case in point are the Hardy Boys, who have had two hundred or more adventures and are still not 20. Slightly more literary, but no less busy it can seem, was Sherlock Holmes, for Watson declaimed many times that he did not write down all that man's exploits. Tony Reynolds here gives us eight more cases, making Holmes' workload even more impressive.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907685618</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Polly Samson
|title=Perfect Lives
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=The eleven short stories in Perfect Lives are about a group of people living in an English seaside town. Each story of challenged relationships, devastating discoveries and objects and people with a history is carefully and beautifully crafted, stands alone and works well in its own right, but the connections between all the stories offer an extra, fascinating dimension. Each story made me want to look at the others again to understand how they all connect, to piece together the different bits of people's lives in each story. This format also offers an opportunity to see some of the characters from several different perspectives, and perhaps make the short stories more satisfying to those who are dissatisfied by their brevity, as some of the same characters reappear, so offering some of the advantages of the novel while staying in the short story form. There are four stories told in the first person by an unnamed woman who is married with two young sons, and then one of her sons has a story of his own (Ivan Knows). There are a variety of narrative viewpoints – women, men, a little boy, a teenage girl, first and third person.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1860499929</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Shena Mackay
|title=The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=This volume of short stories, first published in 2008 but new in paperback, has a lot to offer those familiar with Shena Mackay's previous work and readers coming to her stories for the first time, with a generous thirty six stories - thirteen recent stories collected in book form for the first time are combined with twenty three from Shena Mackay's previous collections.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099469677</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sheila O'Flanagan
|title=A Season to Remember
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=We first meet the Lodge owners, a likable couple. They find running their upmarket country house type hotel both exhilarating and exhausting. The novel is bang up to date so O'Flanagan gets in the whole recession/banker-bashing thing early on. As the festive season looms, the unthinkable has happened. Empty rooms. They're not used to empty rooms, at any time of the year. Normally the Lodge is a full house. But then a slow and steady trickle starts as our characters book in - and the story starts proper, so to speak.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755375157</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Mortimer
|title=Rumpole at Christmas
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=This book is as slim as one of Rumpole's beloved packets of cigars and it can also be read in the time it takes an average turkey to cook in the oven on Christmas Day. A handful of festive, short stories is covered in this book with its appealing front cover. Most of the stories have been previously published elsewhere, mainly in 'The Strand Magazine' but also in some of the national newspapers.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141039779</amazonuk>
}}
