Purchase an e-book here!

Take four strangers arriving in London on the same train one weekday morning, then follow them as their various endeavours sees them criss-cross the capital before they take the same service north later in the day.

A group of five friends who, some thirty years after they lived and worked in the same town, come back together to honour an old friend who has recently died. The weekend is intended as a celebration but merely serves to reignite old emotions and uncover long-held secrets. “Sally Rooney meets Henry James” – Jim Friedman “a story that questions the whole idea of friendship and the notion that we can ever really know anyone” – Janet Philo “a deeply engaging book…every moment of dialogue and recollection is thoroughly believable” – David Punter

An Irregular Piece of Sky contains fifteen contemporary stories in which we meet characters who are trying to come to terms with loss and grief, the potential of love, their histories, and the opportunities the future may offer them.

Her voice is a trigger; a voice which forces Neil to relive the crises and failures of his past, and which offers him the possibility of a positive new future. But before he can decide on what he wants the life ahead of him to look like – and her role in it – he must pass judgement on himself.

The nature of relationships dominates this international collection of contemporary short stories; not just relationships between people, but also between individuals and their pasts and, in consequence, their potential futures. The British and Continental American authors of “Making Marks in the Sand” explore the nature of love, regret and loss, peeling back the veneer on everyday life. Often gritty, this is a powerful and moving collection.

It is particularly pleasing to be able to bring together the work of forty-seven talented writers – from the UK, the USA, Australia and New Zealand – to create what is a truly eclectic mix of styles and genres. This is our second anthology following on from the publication of “New Contexts: 1” in January of this year.

Globally the number of people being creative with language is truly extraordinary. While each of us will have our individual reasons for writing, many of them common, where the majority truly come together is in the desire to be read. When it comes to publication however, of the two deciding factors – talent and luck – the latter is the most fickle. The idea for New Contexts was born from the above. Why not harvest just a small sample of good unpublished writing and create an anthology to showcase it?

We often encounter difficulty when trying to reconcile our memories of events with what actually happened. In the almost inevitable mis-match, our mind plays tricks on us, and what we have recently learned and how we have recently lived gets in the way and colours the past. Pressed to recall his own life, the challenge of juggling myth and reality is dangerously fraught for Luke – especially given the story of his remarkable emotional high, and the catastrophe which followed it. “If there was one thing I knew about Luke it was that he liked certainty and closure; he hated loose ends and from what I could see they upset him. But looking back now, is that really true? I mean, did I really think that at the time or is it just me seeing into the heart of it, now that it’s all too late?”

Liam is haunted by his age and the history it forces upon him. Yet he is also plagued by the need to make more – to generate new memories to recall later, before it gets too late, especially when his wife of over thirty years turns his world upside down, as does the woman he meets in an anonymous hotel dining room. Against a background of domestic parental turmoil, his daughter fights her own demons to try and make sense of her place in a disintegrating family and the wider world. Much of our lives is enslaved by the act of remembering – but sometimes it is about the opposite of that…

Life weaves its magic of triumphs and disappointments everywhere, and often those burdened with more than their fair share of tragedy can feel lost and alone. Even in a quiet backwater like Maunston Quay people struggle to come to terms with their personal suffering and grief – yet Maunston Quay may offer the kind of second chances that gives hope to everyone.

We are all connected. There are links – like links in a chain – that join each of us, everyone to everyone else. “Degrees of Separation” is a series of short stories, each tied to the next it through one of its two characters. The book’s invisible thread weaves its way across geography and time until the circle is made complete when a character from the first story appears again in the final one. But each story is also a narrative about separation in its own right; a wife from a husband, a son from a father, a friend from a friend. “Degrees of Separation” explores what it means to be apart, and considers the things that can divide us – or potentially keep us together.

What do you most need when facing a complete disintegration of the life you have been leading? Where does the loss of your job, the betrayal of your wife, lead you? Well, in Neville’s case to a small tea shop at the foot of the Malvern hills. But if he has gone there for some peace, some solitude, the chance to assess his situation and get his life back in order, then he is in for a shock. Is it madness that makes his coffee cup keep magically refilling, or the china geese on the wall try and fly away? And how could it be possible that a stale slice of Black Forest Gateaux would suddenly be able to offer him Agony Aunt advice? Guided by Samuel, an aged coach driver (in his equally aged coach!), follow Neville as his travels take him to Paris, to the Derby at Epsom, dancing on a cruise ship, and into outrageous and dangerous adventures – and towards an unlikely romance that might just save his life…

Given his profession as a Historian, it was inevitable that Mark would find himself one day writing the biography of his late father, the acclaimed author Charles Packard. As his biographer, Mark is blessed with a wealth of material: first-hand experience, his father’s own work, the testimonies of his Aunt, and Charles’ friends, colleagues – and enemies. Yet what he uncovers is unexpected, revealing elements of his father’s life that resonate with his own. The parallels he reveals begin to intrude in a very tangible way on Mark’s interpretation of own his life, his history becoming more closely aligned to that of his father. Instead of being the closing of a chapter, a sealing up of the past, the biography proves to be something far darker, unleashing personal daemons that Mark could never have anticipated.

Collected together for the first time, Ian Gouge’s three novellas: Losing Moby Dick – a fable about loss and discovery; Writing to Gisella – t story about love, lost and found; and Riding the Escalators – a tale about an innocent adventure that turns sinister and surreal.

Primarily a writer of longer pieces of fiction, Ian Gouge has written two novels – “Mirrors” and “The Big Frog Theory” – and a number of novellas – “Losing Moby Dick”, “Writing to Gisella”, and “Riding the Escalators”. “Secrets & Wisdom” is his first collection of short stories, harvested over a period of many years.