Luca Serra, "This Is Home"

Originally from Northern Italy, Luca Serra has been living in Scotland for thirteen years. From an early age, he has been interested in creative activities such as writing and painting. He has dedicated himself to writing for about fifteen years and has so far written four novels and various short stories in Italian and English. In January 2020 he received the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for Fiction. Since early 2021 he became a literary editor and mentor at Product Magazine, where he mentors emerging writers as part of the "Write Here, Write Now" programme. He currently teaches literacy and Creative Writing at HMP Glenochil.

Luca is particularly interested in contemporary social issues such as immigration, identity, and the divisive politics of today. Through his writing, he aims to explore the challenges and experiences that come with moving to new, unfamiliar places and how the characters establish their identity and purpose in those places. His characters are often misfits and minorities who pull out the remarkable and, sometimes, absurd in ordinary, day-to-day lives.

This Is Home, his debut English novel, was published by Leamington Books in January 2026.

About This Is Home, by Luca Serra 
This Is Home is a vivid, multivoiced story cycle that follows characters forging new lives far from where they began. Serra’s novel moves between London and Glasgow, tracing the emotional landscapes of migration, friendship, and the fragile search for belonging.

You can read more about This Is Home on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From This Is Home
A Friday stroll on Sauchiehall street is never just a stroll. Brunilda had got used to it. You might exchange a smile with perfect strangers, often locals, carrying amicable manners in their blood, well proud of the definition "Scotland’s friendliest city," well proud of being one of those "People Make Glasgow" people. Then, a block away, you might witness the first puke of the weekend, vile fruit of a 2pm football drinking session. 1.6 miles of buskers, beggars, reckless youths, hen parties, leaving parties, stag dos, today’s neds and punks, tomorrow’s artists. It’s home of immigrants young and old, hipsters, rebels, people with no tribe, everyone belonging to a huge, infinite family: the Glaswegians. It’s a street of no structure, a street of pure, erratic life. 

Brunilda often wondered what her role was on those 1.6 miles of walking stories. She watched and absorbed, taking in words, phrases and scenes to share with mum and grandma, one day, back in Brazil, home: the only place where she felt that unique, visceral sense of belonging. Brazil was everything she had been so far, her foundation and youth. Glasgow was the present, the moment, and although it was growing in her, it retained the shapes, lights and colours of an unfamiliar place. She didn’t see herself chatting away with a busker or consoling a kid who’s fallen off the bike: she felt like she’d be stepping on somebody else’s toes. As consequences of actions were unpredictable, she simply attended that daily march of pure, erratic life, rather than participated. She was a passive spectator.

Colette Paul, "A Complete Success"

 

Colette Paul was born in Glasgow. She is the author of Whoever you Choose to Love (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Phoenix) , a collection of stories which were serialized on Radio 4, and shortlisted for The Spirit of Scotland Writer Award. Colette’s work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including Mslexia, Edinburgh Review, Stand, and Litro. Colette’s story ‘O Tell me the Truth About Love!’ won the Tom Gallon / Royal Society of Authors Prize, and three of her stories were included in Victoria Hislop’s edited anthology, The Story: 100 Great Short Stories by Women. Her second collection of stories, A Complete Success, is due to be published this Autumn. Colette lives in Cambridge, where she teaches Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. 

About A Complete Success, by Colette Paul

This is a sharply observed collection which finds comedy and sadness in the ordinary lives of ordinary characters—teenage girls, middle-aged divorcees, a man facing his last night alone in hospital. The stories are linked by a sense of lives in transition, with the attendant fear, exhilaration, and sense of loss those moments can bring. Time after time, characters struggle to understand and communicate their feelings, to their loved ones and to themselves. Despite the melancholy theme, the stories are shot through with humour and lightness, a sense of life in all its complicated messiness. 

You can read more about A Complete Success on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening story of the collection. 

From A Complete Success

From 'Rats'

Before my boyfriend leaves for work he says, ‘I saw another rat last night. You better talk to that neighbour today about feeding the birds.’

‘You talk to her,’ I say. 

‘You’re the one who’s lumbering around the house all day,’ he says. ‘I’ve not got a minute to myself from the moment I get into the lab.’

‘Lumbering,’ I say, ‘that’s very nice!’

‘You were still in your dressing gown when I came home last night.’ 

‘Because I didn’t feel well!’ 

He stops fiddling with his bike helmet and says quietly, ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Why do you think I’m crying?’

He lets out a sigh of frustration. ‘It’s really annoying how you answer a question with another question.’ He sits down next to me with a look of defeat. ‘Do you think you might be depressed?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘is that a question? I thought we weren’t allowed to answer a question with another question.’ 

Since we moved here six months ago, we argue all the time. I blame my boyfriend for bringing me here, where I have no job and no friends. It doesn’t matter that I’d just got made redundant, or that my best friend had moved to Spain, or that I was actually excited to move somewhere new—I still blame him. It’s not fair, I know, but that is one of the downsides of being such a decisive and definite person, like my boyfriend. 

*

I get dressed and put on some makeup and knock on my next-door neighbour’s door. She is a tiny, stooped old woman, with bright eyes like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. From our bedroom window we have witnessed her throwing bird seed around her garden with surprising energy.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I say, ‘but we live next door, and we’ve been getting a lot of rats in our garden. The internet says it might be because you’re feeding the birds—the rats are attracted to anywhere they can find food.’ 

‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘have you got them as well?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Loads of them. They seem to be coming from your garden.’ 

‘I hear them scurrying around, scratch-scratch-scratch, all hours of the day.’ 

‘In your house?’ I say, horrified. 

‘I don’t know,’ she chuckles. ‘The council’s been round a few times, but they can’t see where they’re coming from either.’

‘Well maybe you could try stopping feeding the birds,’ I say. ‘That’s the biggest way to get rid of them, the internet says.’ 

‘Oh I love my birds,’ she says. ‘I sit and watch them all day. They’re the only thing that keeps me going since my husband died.’ 

Catherine Tudish, "A Thousand Souls: A Novel in Stories"

 

Catherine Tudish is the author of the novel American Cream and the story collection Tenney’s Landing. She has taught writing and literature at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the Bread Loaf School of English. She now lives in a village in central Vermont, where she teaches a community writing workshop at the local library.

About A Thousand Souls: A Novel in Stories, by Catherine Tudish
The fourteen stories of A Thousand Souls interweave the lives of three generations in the remote village of Neptune, Vermont, as they inevitably touch the outside world. Even as their loyalties and traditions are tested through times of loss, betrayal, and discovery, these characters embody an abiding connection to place. Sharply observed, wry, and deeply tender, these stories resonate with both the intricacy and cost of interconnection as the years pass, and ordinary lives take unexpected turns.

You can read more about A Thousand Souls on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the title story. 

From A Thousand Souls

My name is Stewart Prime. I drive a rural mail route, which gives me a lot of time to think. Lately I’ve been thinking about how a tiny thing—a worn-out gear, say, or a word misspoken—can change a person’s life forever. It’s hardly a new topic with me. The turning point of my life came early, not long after my sixth birthday, when my mother and father and older brother Henry died in the collapse of a carnival Ferris wheel. They happened to be in the seat at the very top when things went wrong. Others were injured, but no one except my parents and my brother was killed. I was in the hospital at the time, recovering from a tonsillectomy. Henry had promised to win a prize for me at the pitching booth and bring it to my hospital room. I don’t know if he won a prize or not. They might have gone on the Ferris wheel before playing any of the games. 

*

For some time after the accident, I met my family in a dream. I would walk outside in the early morning to find my mother and father and brother waiting for me on the cool grass. The sun would be rising behind them, and in that gauzy light I could see they were angels with beautiful wings, like the angels in the church window. As I got closer to them, they would take off their wings and lay them gently on the ground.

“Why are you taking off your wings?” I would ask, fascinated by the pearly whiteness of the feathers.

“It’s the only way we can be with you, sweetheart,” my mother would say.

“We don’t mind,” Henry would add, casting a wistful glance behind him.

When my father smiled at me and opened his arms, I would know it was true. They had come back to me. I couldn’t help it, I cried for joy.

*

I must have been about nine when I understood, even while I was dreaming, that the angels were not real. My family was never coming back. 

Jennifer Maritza McCauley, "Neon Steel"

 

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (Stalking Horse Press), the short story collections When Trying to Return Home (Counterpoint), and Recognition (U. Wisconsin Press, forthcoming 2027), the poetry collections Kinds of Grace (Flower Song), VERSUS (Texas Review Press, 2027) and Tumbao (Texas Review Press, 2029) and the speculative collection Neon Steel (Cornerstone, Feb 2026). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Bookshop. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her website is here. 

About Neon Steel, by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Neon Steel is acclaimed writer Jennifer Maritza McCauley's love letter to millennial nerd culture. Anime fans, vampires, indie rappers, robots, comic book fans, and thrill seekers find their way through the Steel City's neighborhoods and haunts. A young girl discovers an underground world of Afro Otaku who change the way she sees the city; a high school student discovers a kindred spirit in a Bomba girl; The Terminator (1984) is reimagined as a josei story featuring a purple loc'd robot; and a secret coven of vampires who hide out in Pittsburgh steel mills risk being discovered after they lose one of their own. Magical realist and neon-lit, Neon Steel faithfully follows a group of nerds and the magic that excites them, bringing to life a city and a state of being.

Below, you can read a sample story from the collection, originally published in Latin@Literatures here. 

From Neon Steel

The Girl in Bomba Dress 

Adrienne was late, per usual. She hated being late, but here she was, late for Algebra II and she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in front of all of those white kids by being late. What would they say? Dumb girl from Sharpsburg, of course she’s nothing. Or their eyes would do all the gibbering. Pin-points and spitfire that’s what they’d give her. Who cared? Either way.

She ran from her place on Chapman Street, fast, faster than she normally ran, her backpack slamming up and down on her little back and causing her red pain. As she was running, past trash-thick cans and darkened bars and coffee shops bright and yanking folks in for heavy caffeine, she was thinking about how all she needed to do was get to the bus stop and make it to homeroom and she’d be fine. She could be quiet, nobody would notice her if she blended in and said nothing. She just had to get there. They all knew her, after all she was the only Black girl in the school outside of Tiana, and they knew Adri as the one who Always Did School Right. But here she was late. Per usual.

Halfway through Adri’s sprint down the high stacked rust-red buildings she heard a grunt. It was a woman’s grunt but it was stark enough that Adri stopped in her tracks, thinking someone was hurt. She turned around and approached the alley behind her, black and garbage-filled, the cans drooping with shit and pizza.

She walked past the alleyway and toward an opening behind her, flanked by grafitti’d brick of Black people, hollering and wearing purple, looking royal. In the center of the open space there was a young woman, a little older, but not much more than Adri’s sixteen years. She had long hair in fluffing curls. She wore an ivory dress crimping and flying as she danced. Her eyes were closed. She was meditating, meditating, her muscles tensing, tensing. She sang Bambula, Bambula. Adri stared at this girl, not knowing exactly what to say, and while she was trying to gauge how fast she should run to class, the girl’s eyes snapped open and she saw Adri.

"Who are you?" she said.

"What?" Adri whispered. She could tell this bomba girl was beautiful, her body bronzed and blazing. The bomba girl could be a terrifying stranger but Adri felt soft around this girl. What was she doing in an alley in the middle of Pittsburgh of all places?

"Where are you going?" the bomba girl asked gently, her voice deeper than whatever young age she was.

"To school," Adri gulped. "Aren’t you in school?"

"No," she said. “I work in the night. I practice bomba in the day, preparing myself."

"For what?"

She turned back to her swishing work and spread her hands out, she shook them. The bangles on her wrists clanged and clacked.

"You do this without drums?" Adrienne asked. Her family in Puerto Rico would bomba sometimes, she knew you couldn’t flail and shake without a good beat.

She pressed her hand against her chest. "It’s in here."

"I don’t believe that."

"That’s very American. To be so cynical."

Adrienne shrugged. "Girl, I’m a junior. I’m just trying to get into college."

She smiled, a half-grin and went back to the quick work of moving her hands about.

"Okay," she said, in that unnervingly dark voice and Adrienne didn’t know what to do with her. "That’s your path."

"This is a sacred art," Adrienne opined. "Why do you do it?"

"Girl," she mimicked Adrienne and swept her hands out. "Aren’t you a sacred art?" Adrienne’s face said "WTF," and it was true. Adrienne didn’t value herself at all. She was just a high school girl from Sharpsburg with nothing to her name but a bunch of slurs hurled at her face and here was this gorgeous girl talking about how she was something beautiful.

"I guess I am."

"Say it with your chest, mami."

"I want to do what you do, freely," she said. Then she said it with her chest, another cliché: "Puedo hacer cualquier cosa …"

"O le ṣe," she tried, in a language Adri didn’t know and as she spun around Adrienne saw her own face in her spinning. "There you go," she said gently. She stopped dancing and came over and tugged at the belt around her waist. "Me quiero tal como soy …"

She reached out and clutched her hands. Adrienne remembered she had homeroom but as she gripped her heated fingers back she suddenly didn’t care. They could say what they wanted. She stretched her back and Adri stretched hers. They were dancing, dancing, dancing African-Boricua music, taking them to palm tree’d places they’d never been, in Pittsburgh’s aching center, not worried about the time.

Elizabeth Baines, "Five Different Stories About One Thing"

Elizabeth Baines is the author of the novels The Birth Machine, Too Many Magpies and Astral Travel, and the story collections Balancing on the Edge of the World and Used to Be. She is also a prizewinning playwright for radio and stage, and an audiobook of her comedy radio series The Circle is published by Audible.

Elizabeth's website is here. 

About Five Different Stories About One Thing, by Elizabeth Baines
A ghost story, a love story, crime, science fiction and a postmodern story: here are the different experiences and attitudes of five linked characters, all affected by the same thing in the past. This is a slyly subversive experiment in genre, exploring the legacy of generational trauma.

You can read more about Five Different Stories About One Thing on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Five Different Stories About One Thing

Extract from "Home," a ghost story

As she opens the garden gate, something flicks, a crack in the light. A black bird flying up from the hedge.

"Male blackbird," says her twelve-year-old nephew, Sam. He has come up behind her with one of the boxes out of the van.

Her sister Sarah follows, carrying another. "Emma, it’s so quaint!"

They stand and survey the tiny terraced cottage, the place where she’ll be now, a single woman once more, beginning again. The stone walls, the deep-set little windows, their paint flaking, the uneven-looking slates on the roof. The unkempt garden, which Sarah says she’ll get in shape in no time, pale primroses half-hidden in the long grass. A cherry tree, its basket of still-bare branches glinting in the afternoon light.

Sam, mad on birds, mad on nature and science, peers into the hedge. "I bet there’s a nest."

Sarah’s husband and his mate lug in the bed and struggle with it on the angle of the narrow stone stairs.

Sarah spins in the little add-on kitchen. "You’ll be OK here." Big sister protector. Leaning back into the role she had in their childhood, their troubled childhood. It’s way in the past now, their father long dead and gone, yet here she is still playing the little sister-mother. "Lick of paint, new units, maybe, in time."

"Cool," says Sam, opening the iron door beside the fireplace in the one downstairs room, the old oven.

She would like them to go now. She wants to be alone with her new independence, and to savour the house for herself.

At last, in a tangle of voices and banging van doors, they’re off, Sarah and her family away back to their impenetrable domestic life.

The atmosphere of the house sifts around her. Smells of wood and stone, a slight whiff of mould that, now the house is occupied, should soon be banished. A soft pressure of history. A new history for her to belong to, she thinks.

Something shifts in the room above, a sound like a shove, and for a split-second she thinks someone’s still there ...

"The Subtle Art of Short Fiction," ed. Isabelle Kenyon

About The Subtle Art of Short Fiction, ed. Isabelle Kenyon
The Subtle Art of Short Fiction explores the power of short fiction in today’s fragmented world. Renowned authors and critics offer advanced techniques for crafting nuanced, impactful stories.

Learn to master short story structure, subtext, micro-tension, and sensory minimalism. Ideal for experienced writers seeking to refine their skills in this sophisticated art form, or those who love short fiction, and want to learn about the craft behind it.

The book includes essays and writing exercises by Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Daisy Johnson, Matt Wesolowski, Sascha Akhtar, David Hartley, Mahsuda Snaith, Jonathan Taylor, Sarah Schofield, SJ Bradley and Farhana Shaikh, and has an introduction by Dr Paul March-Russell.

You can read more about The Subtle Art of Short Fiction on the publisher's website here. 

About the editor
Isabelle Kenyon is the Managing Director of Manchester publishing house Fly on the Wall Press, and was named a Leader of the Year by the Bookseller in 2025. Founded in 2018, she has led Fly on the Wall Press from Small Press of the Year finalist status at the British Book Awards 2021-23 to their win in the North, in 2024. She is the MA Module Leader for "Publishing in the 21st Century" at Arts University Bournemouth, and the author of psychological thriller The Dark Within Them and poetry collections including Growing Pains (Indigo Dreams).​ She previously coordinated the Northern Fiction Alliance and runs PR campaigns for writers and publishers under Kenyon Author Services. 

From The Subtle Art of Short Fiction

From The Art of Anticipation and Revelation

by Daisy Johnson

I have noticed something recently about children. It is the waiting that they love. My sons sit at the kitchen table watching me, spoons floating half way to their open mouths, eyes wide. I am doing something silly, making a noise or pretending to hide or doing a funny walk. Each time when I stop they call for me to do it again, again, again. I pretend not to, I cannot possibly, no, I am very busy, but they know I am lying. It is this moment of withholding that they find most joyous. The best short stories, for me, carve out most perfectly that delicious space of anticipation.

In Miranda July’s short story "The Metal Bowl," the protagonist describes herself acting in a porn video when she was younger. "I wasn’t directed so much as given a series of props to make my way through, like an obstacle course. A turquoise Teddy bear, a pillow, an empty beer bottle, a metal bowl. Not everything was clear to me (the bowl), but I was too nervous to speak." From this moment we move through the story with a growing question. What was the metal bowl for? The question is an elastic tension which connects us to the protagonist.

In Shirley Jackon’s "The Lottery," the very title of the story is a question which we go in asking: what is The Lottery? The people of a small village begin to gather in the square: "Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example." As with the mysterious metal bowl, we wonder, what are these stones for? Unlike July’s story it is clear that the characters know more than us, that the trembling, questioning tension belongs only to the reader ... 

Constantine, "Tales of the Charnwood"

Congratulations to University of Leicester MA Creative Writing graduate Constantine on the publication of his new book of short stories!

Constantine is an autistic author and father. He achieved a first-class B.A. at Middlesex University in 2017 and completed his Master's Degree at the University of Leicester in 2022. Between the two degrees he wrote four episodes of the Children's T.V. show Pablo and has written and published the picture book Tiya and the Minotaur and The Cats of Charnwood Forest and its sequel Jötunheim. He runs the not-for-profit publishers Coalville Community Publishers CIC, which concentrates on the central Midlands, and Midlands generally. 

About Tales of the Charnwood, by Constantine
Tales of the Charnwood is eight bedtime stories about life on the Charnwood as recounted by a Vixen to her cubs. The book is set in the universe of The Cats of Charnwood Forest. 

You can read more about Tales of the Charnwood on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a complete short story from the collection. 

From Tales of the Charnwood

Chapter Four: Badgers. 

The following evening, Vixen sat at the mouth of the den watching her cubs play for a few safe pre-dawn hours. She noticed that some of her darling children were teasing the smallest cub.  Every family has someone who is the smallest, just as someone must be the biggest. Being a fox of the Charnwood, Vixen knew right from wrong and made plans to teach her cubs the difference. 

She had a good store of stories at her command and soon remembered one that would suffice. 

The story of the Friendly Badger. 

Once her cubs had come back inside and had finished suckling, she began. 

"Now, dear ones, I will tell you a story of a Badger. Some Badgers are okay in their own way, some have even been known to share a den with a fox and even be on talking terms; however, these are few and far between. 

"Generally speaking, Badgers are grumpy and aggressive and quite scary, even when they’re on friendly terms, except for one. This is the story of the Friendly Badger." 

*** 

A long time ago in the quiet of the forest, a litter of Badgers was born.  As with every family, there was a biggest and a smallest; but while the smallest had a small body, he had the biggest heart. 

He wasn’t so good at the rough-and-tumble games his siblings liked to play. He much preferred to sniff flowers, watch the stars, or talk to any creatures he happened to meet. 

His own brothers and sisters were the first to tease him for his size and poor skill in wrestling contests. So, bit by bit, he started to avoid his siblings. Feeling lonely, he tried to make friends with the other night-time forest dwellers.    

One night, he met a fox going about its business.   

"Hello," said the Friendly Badger, "how are you?"   

"Are you talking to me?" said the fox. 

"Yes," said the Friendly Badger, "I’m hoping we can be friends."   

The fox laughed at him. 

"You can’t be a real Badger. Real Badgers aren’t friendly. You must be a rat with white stripes."  

And from that night on every time the fox saw him, he would delight in saying something cruel.   

On another night, the Badger came across a bat darting from tree to tree eating tiny insects.   

"Hello," said the Friendly Badger, "how are you?"   

"Are you talking to me?" said the bat.   

"Yes," said the Friendly Badger, "I’m hoping we can be friends."   

"Is this some sort of joke?" laughed the bat. "You’re more like a stripy bunny rabbit."   

And from that day on, whenever the bat saw the Friendly Badger, he would laugh at him and make up new insults.  

The Friendly Badger started to feel that maybe nobody would like him. Then, one evening, sitting on his own watching the stars, he heard a snuffling in the bushes. A moment later, a head appeared under the lower leaves; it was a young hedgehog.   

"Hello," said the hedgehog, "what sort of creature are you?"  

"I’m a badger," said the Friendly Badger. "Would you like to be friends?"  

"Oh yes," said the hedgehog. "Do you like hide-and-seek?" 

"Yes," said the Friendly Badger, "it’s one of my favourite games, but I’ve never had anyone to play with."   

In no time at all, the pair were playing merrily and agreed to meet up the following night.    

The next evening, when the Friendly Badger arrived at the meeting place, he was surrounded by a crowd of adult Hedgehogs, their spines quivering with anger. They shouted at him and chased him away, warning that they would hurt him if he came near their children again.   

Every creature the Friendly Badger met hurt and rejected him. He didn’t understand why. He meant no harm to anyone, and yet everyone hurt him. 

That autumn, he dug a new home (which for Badgers is called a sett) just for himself and went to sleep dreaming about all the horrible things people had said to him.   

Now, when animals like Badgers hibernate, they often grow, and when he emerged in the spring, he had gone from being the smallest to one of the biggest Badgers the Charnwood had ever seen.   

He was no longer the "Friendly Badger."   

In the long winter, dreaming of all the horrid things those other creatures had said and done to him, his heart had frozen and would never thaw again. He sought out everyone who used to tease and bully him, and, one by one ... he ate them.   

But even then, when those who had teased him were gone, and no creature dared come near, the horrible names stayed with him. He spent the rest of his days lonely, sad, and angry.   

***   

"You see, children," said the Vixen, pausing just long enough to make her cubs uncomfortable. "When you bully someone, everybody loses." 

A. J. Ashworth, "Maybe the Birds"

A. ‎J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won The Scott Prize and was shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The Times Literary Supplement said that her work "displays impressive versatility" and that her stories "do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution." She is the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, which was her own idea to raise funds for The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University and works as an associate editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Maybe the Birds is her second collection and features "Leather" which was selected for Best British Short Stories.

About Maybe the Birds, by A. J. Ashworth
After the apocalypse destroys most life on Earth, a woman makes artificial bird voiceboxes to try to keep birdsong alive. A young female vampire uses her knowledge of mirrors to save her village from the man who turned her. A woman haunted by her past feels that the robins she has always loved are no longer her friends. These fourteen stories, largely speculative in nature, consider what happens when the world is no longer as it used to be – whether in the postapocalyptic future, the paleolithic past or the dark north of the present. The collection is interested in love and loss, families and foes, as well as moments of disconnection and connection. All are interested in what it means to be alive in very difficult times.

You can read more about Maybe the Birds on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Maybe the Birds

From the title story "Maybe the Birds"

I watch the dog. The dog watches something through the patio doors to the backyard. Every now and then his head tilts to one side in the way it does when I talk to him or sing to him. Although there is no sound that would make him do that now. Not that I can make out anyway. But dogs have better hearing, don’t they? They hear things no human ear is capable of detecting.

Like dog whistles.

The low growl of thunder from five miles away.

A million voices screaming from the other side of the world.

Maybe the birds are singing but I just can’t hear them. Maybe there is someone out there shuffling about. Maybe, maybe ... But this is all just wishful thinking – the birds, someone being out there. It’s the way your mind gets in the quiet. He’s probably just got his eyes on all the brown leaves in the yard and wondering why they’re there. "Why all these brown leaves in the spring, Ma?" I imagine him asking in the human voice I have given to him. But I haven’t got any answers. None that he would understand anyway. And so I keep quiet, and just carry on watching as he tilts his head the other way. Not once looking at me. Eyes full on whatever has got his attention through the grey dust coating the glass on the patio door. The little dots of his pupils as black as the night used to be.

Gus Gresham, "Angel Reach"

 

Fresh from ditching an engineering career in the early 1980s, Gus Gresham found his road guru and lifelong friend Laurie lying stoned and unconscious at the edge of a vineyard in the afternoon sun, an empty Beaujolais bottle in the grass and a Jack Kerouac novel spread-eagled on his chest …

They picked grapes in the same picturesque French villages; laboured in olive groves on Crete and pumpkin paddocks in New South Wales; sought enlightenment in India and did the Auf Wiedersehen Pet bit on building sites in Germany. They followed seasonal work doing pretty much everything from thousand-acre wheat harvests to beachcombing. They slept in cornfields and woke up at dawn to wash their faces in the morning dew and start hitchhiking …

Alongside hard travelling, Gus always had a passion for writing, and somehow in between it all he has been a mechanical engineer, environmental activist, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal-skills facilitator, and mature student (MA in Creative Writing; MSc in Building Surveying). Currently, he juggles a building-surveying career with being a husband, father and writer.

His short stories have appeared in literary magazines and online. He is author of the novel Kyiv Trance and author of the young adult novels Earthrise and Marmalade Skies. Angel Reach collects his short stories from across 30 years; some are from those intervening decades, others are fresh off the press.

About Angel Reach, by Gus Gresham
Angel Reach explores the human condition through flawed characters whose vital, often strange journeys may bring them happiness or ruin.

In the north of England, a visit from a tall man who smells of rust could be the antidote for Emily’s reclusiveness. But how can you trust somebody if you’ve never seen their eyes? 
A young man who lives in a Manhattan attic may be a prophet or lunatic. In parallel, a young woman takes on social injustice wherever she encounters it. While neither have much regard for their own safety, they inevitably affect the lives of others. What will become of Tabbie and Finn? And what will happen when their paths cross?

Struggling over the death of a child, a man haunts Venice in a modern-day tribute to Daphne du Maurier’s "Don’t Look Now."

On the west coast of Ireland, a bully finds personal and perhaps universal truth.

In an imagined Slavic folktale, Agata faces unimaginable challenges as she searches for the key to her life.

An astronaut is locked in an illuminating battle for survival on an exo-planet.

Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Angel Reach

One Last Look

I wander the moonlit grounds with a bullet in my chest. No pain, just the bullet. How did that happen?

Has she got snipers on the roof now?

I watch the blood pumping out of the hole in clotted gobs that rhyme with my heartbeat. And even at this juncture, I think about some of the rare, good moments I’ve had with Charlie.

Go, I tell myself. Just go. She’ll be all right.

But I turn back to the house. There’s a light on in the dining-room and Charlie’s sitting alone at the table. I press my face to the glass.

She looks up. For a second, her expression is cold. Then she smiles. Crosses to the window. Opens it. She laughs as I jump through and land on the bare boards.

"You can’t do it," she says. "We belong."

She raises a crooked finger, pokes it in the hole in my chest and wiggles it about. It feels … okay. I put my hands round her waist. With her body against mine, the old chemistry pops and fizzes. In my peripheral vision, shadowy figures pass by outside.

"Don’t worry about them," she says. "Glass of wine?"

We sit across from each other at the mirror-top table. Our faces are distorted and ugly in the reflection. Charlie’s eyes are soot-black as she pours black wine from a black bottle into black glasses.

"I can’t stay long," I say.

She shrugs, and traces patterns on the table with a fingernail. My eyes begin to water, and my nostrils feel harsh. Uncontrollable laughter warbles out of me.

"What?" she says.

"Laughing at myself," I say. "Sitting here with a bullet in my chest and I was just worrying that I might be coming down with a cold."

"Another one?" she says. "Don’t give it to me."

I hear a dull, erratic thumping. I think it’s my heart giving out, but it’s noises from upstairs. Military boots? The butts of automatic weapons striking the floor? And something big is being dragged into position. Furniture? Torture equipment? From a crack in the ceiling, a ribbon of pale dust comes powdering down through the air.

Karen Stevens, "Brilliant Blue"

 

Karen Stevens writes short fiction and has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including The Big Issue, Fish Publishing, Salt Publishing and Valley Press. She was runner-up for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award in 2023. Her edited collection of essays Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her co-edited collection of short stories High Spirits won a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology in 2019. Karen is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and lives in West Sussex. Brilliant Blue is her first collection of short stories.

About Brilliant Blue, by Karen Stevens
Welcome to the infamous Duncock Estate. Nestled on the South English coast, it is a place where identity matters; where people hold down jobs and do their best. Where taboos are broken, adultery is committed, and problems can’t be wished away. But even tragedy can be tinged with fragile hopes and humour.

You can read more about Brilliant Blue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the book. 

 

From Brilliant Blue

Extract from ‘Among the Crows’

It was knocking on four o’clock when Andy decided he’d had enough. There was no end to it: road after road of council houses with verges that he needed to strim. He’d taken his time again; just couldn’t be bothered. A full hour for lunch and several tea breaks, while Maciej – Mac, they’d nicknamed him at work – kept on going. The man was a machine. Intensely efficient.

The heat was doing Andy in; his throat felt scorched. He switched off the strimmer, removed his goggles and ear defenders. The sudden stillness alarmed him. He glanced behind, half expecting a drugged-up maniac to lunge and nick his strimmer. Mac was on the opposite side of the road, further on, heading for the finish line. For health and safety, the council’s rules were that workers must stay in pairs, but it was impossible for Andy to keep up with Mac, and impossible for Mac to slow down.

Andy watched Mac’s automated motion. His biceps were loaves. He swung his arms from left to right, chopping swathes of nettles and grass, getting the job done. No work, no cake, he’d say simply, whenever Andy griped about being sent into the dark heart of the Duncock Estate.

He sat on the verge and took in the council houses, their concrete walls bleached dirty-white from the sun. Objects poked out from the parched grass of a ramshackle garden opposite.

A rusting fridge revealed its mouldy interior. A child the same age as his Cora could fit in there, closing the door to hide, suffocating within minutes. He kept his eye on the fridge and felt relieved that he lived on the outskirts of this sprawling estate, where things were less desperate and hostile.

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, "Cold Toast"

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a Bristol-based writer whose debut collection of flash fiction Cold Toast has recently been published by Dahlia Books. Her work has been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, and elsewhere. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge's Flash Nonfiction competition, Lucent Dreaming’s flash contest, and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and 2025. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash, supported by an Arts Council England DYCP Award. Her author website is here. 

About Cold Toast, by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Rooted in 70s and 80s Britain, this evocative flash fiction collection captures the moments when girls and women first glimpsed their own power – or lack of it.

Set against a backdrop of smoky kitchens, playground politics, and flickering TV sets, these stories trace the quiet rebellions and uneasy compromises of lives shaped by expectation and constraint. Two women discuss an unfaithful husband at the school gates. A father trades his daughter’s first kiss for a fishing trip. A girl becomes convinced the silent calls to her home are from the Yorkshire Ripper.

By turns tender, raw, and defiant, this collection lays bare the tension between freedom and conformity, love and survival, and what it meant to come of age in a world that wasn’t always ready for you.

You can read more about Cold Toast on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample flash fiction from the collection. 

From Cold Toast
Note: this flash fiction, ‘Double Lives,’ appears in Cold Toast and was the winner of Manchester Writing School and Manchester School of Theatre’s ‘QuietManDave Prize’ in 2022, and also appears in Fuel: An anthology of prize-winning flash fictions to raise funds for fuel poverty, edited by Tania Hershman. It is written in the form of a breathless sentence.

Double Lives

I see Gwen at the school gates and she does this thing where she’s looking but not seeing and I’m not in the mood so I wave my hands in her face and she says sorry, but she’s still got this unseeing expression and I ask is everything ok? and she says yeah, if finding out your husband’s living with another woman in the arse end of Wales is ok, and I say what, you mean your husband Rhys? and she nods, and says yes, my husband Rhys, and it’s a crazy way for us to be carrying on because she only has one husband, but I’m not getting it, so I say Rhys Rhys? and she says, Rhys Rhys, and I feel a kind of vertigo because it was only last March when I noticed how he’d started hanging back after dropping the kids off, how easy it was to talk to him about all the stuff no one else ever wants to talk about, like how we all create our own prisons and how we’ll bring our kids up to know there are more choices out there, how I was the only mother he spoke to, the only mother whose jokes he laughed at, and how good it felt to crack a crooked smile in the face Gwen always described as being like a slapped backside―and I think they’ve been together since they were fifteen, to be honest, I had thought a lot about that, about getting to your forties and only sleeping with one other person and if Rhys had ever thought about sleeping with other women before―before that first crazy time―and Gwen says she’s going to get a test from the pharmacy because how many other women has he been sleeping with, and I’m like, you think there could have been more? and she shrugs, and I’m getting this weird double vision thing where the canopies on the horse chestnuts in front of us aren’t lined up with the trunks and my left arm starts going numb, and I say, I’m not feeling too good and she says, Rhys told me you got migraines, and says, bye then, so I say, bye then, and watch her go; double-Gwen surrounded by an aura of fucked electrical impulses only I can see.

Drew Gummerson, "Saltburn"

Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel, and most recently, Saltburn. He is a Lambda Award finalist, Leicestershire Short Story Prize winner. His stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4, and in various anthologies. https://linktr.ee/drewgum

About Saltburn, by Drew Gummerson

Saltburn is a collection of six funny sad queer short stories, all set in the town of Saltburn which is in the north-east of England. I start with an apology  

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.

Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. 

In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.

You can read more about Saltburn on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Saltburn

Warriors of the Wasteland

While their parents watched the actual war spin out on the TV news programme, Look North with Arthur Seagull and Molly Splat, the boys, and one other, being neither boy nor non-boy, played war games down on the mudflats. Setting themselves up into armies, Shirts vs. Skins, Terminators vs. Rambos, Circumcised vs. Hooded (Claws in common parlance, as in, ‘Are you a Claw or Non-Claw?’) they took up positions behind old abandoned shopping trolleys, in forts constructed from for-sale signs stolen from the overgrown gardens of long-derelict houses, and in the abandoned crumbling concrete Martello, stinking of tramps’ piss and filled with sad-looking wrinkled used, sometimes unused, condoms. They were Trojans, all of them.

And these poor innocents, they would go at each other with wild euphoric abandon.

Happy days. The country was never happier, more unified, than when it was at war. 

Except, just as in any war, there were dissenting voices.

Those who were not happy. Not exactly. 

For Sven Tosier-Gumshoe, being the smallest, feyest and, perhaps, because of his position as neither boy nor non-boy, when the war games were coming to their nightly close, ragged, careworn parents having started to line up like gulls along the pier rail, shouting out that it was time for their respective charges to hurry home for tea or there would be tanned hides all round, was the one who was, most often, taken hostage. 

A quick resolution was needed to finish the game. 

‘I’m Private Tosier-Gumshoe,’ they would say. ‘Fifteenth Seal Regiment. Identification Number 35654. I won’t tell you anything.’

Usually then they would come at them with a used condom filled with sand, or a live crab with snapping claws, or the rusty speculum Aart Jansen had stolen from his doctor dad aeons before, telling them with faked horror that a speculum was something you used to look up buttholes. 

‘OK,’ Sven would say, ‘I give in. Our army is massed behind the seal fort… Plans are to advance at midnight… The password is Valkensteeg 17. Just don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you anything.’

Katy Wimhurst, "An Orchid in My Belly Button"

 

Katy Wimhurst is a writer and visual poet. She has had three collections of short stories published — An Orchid in My Belly Button (Elsewhen Press, 2025), Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She occasionally writes literary essays on speculative fiction and interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. Her website is here. She is housebound with the illness M.E.

About An Orchid in My Belly Button
These short stories savour the surreal, flirt with magical realism, dabble with dystopia. A boy sees the ghosts of dead crabs. A girl with a fox tail is bullied. A disenchanted woman sprouts orchids from her belly button. Fashion models pursue the trend of having plants as hair. Electronic goods amassing all over London herald an apocalypse. Darkness and wonder, the strange and the ordinary, interweave to offer an environmental and social portrait of our times. Guaranteed to evoke a response, whether a giggle, a gasp, or a nervous gulp, these stories will stay with you, enriching your perception of the world.

Surreal, absurdist, magical realist: Katy Wimhurst writes speculative fiction that meditates on our reality. Although bleak themes are examined – dystopian futures, the climate crisis, bullying – a quirky imagination and wry humour lift the tales above the ‘realm of grim.’

An Orchid in My Belly Button is published by Elsewhen Press. More about it can be found on the publisher’s website here. An extract from one story is below.

From An Orchid in My Belly Button, by Katy Wimhurst

Snow on Snow

Snow flutters down in her living room, even though the windows are closed. She blinks. The flakes pattern the carpet into white lace and dust the top of her cacti collection. She can’t afford to heat the flat, so she puts on a woolly hat and curls up on the sofa, tugging a tartan blanket around her. She gazes at the icy miracle. How remarkable! 

When the snow stops before bedtime, she makes hot chocolate and changes into fleece pyjamas. Snuggling under the covers with a hot water bottle, she remembers camping in the garden for a week one December when she was a teenager, sixty years ago; she preferred the quiet, cold tent to the heated rows of her parents. Before she drops off to sleep, the icy tingle on her face tells her more flakes are falling. 

She awakes to a flat carpeted in snow, which reaches a few centimetres up the skirting boards and collects footprints when she crunches over it. Nature has adorned the place festively, even if she hasn’t bothered to put decorations up. She puts on warm clothes, a woolly hat, mittens, a jacket, and boots. Her bones are chilly, but the magic of this arctic interior lifts her spirit. 

Hot porridge warms her. Then, using a pastry brush, she flicks the snow off her cacti collection—the Fairy Castles, Old Ladies, Moons, Stars, Bunny Ears, and Golden Barrels. Her ex-husband said they were like her, prickly but resilient. Worried about what the cold might do to the plants, she wraps strips of hessian around their bases, pricking her finger twice.

With a duster, she wipes the snow off a photo on the wall, revealing her niece and two great nieces in Montreal, Canada; so far away. She doesn’t bother wiping the one of her nephew and his family outside Tate Modern, London. 

Neil Campbell, "Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents"

 

Neil Campbell's new collection of short stories Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents is out now. From Manchester, England, he has appeared four times in the annual anthology of Best British Short Stories. He has published three novels, six collections of short stories, two poetry chapbooks and a poetry collection, as well as appearing in numerous magazines and anthologies. His website is here. 

About Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents, by Neil Campbell

Campbell gives voice to the extraordinary (never ordinary) men and women of Manchester. He goes beyond the King's English and formulaic approaches to short stories to capture, in print, how people really talk. Think James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, but Mancunian. Funny and heartfelt, this book is a romp to whizz through with pleasure. Forget mad for it Madchester, this is the Manchester of now, where Hacienda clichés turn into corporate nightmares and the only art is in marketing.

Read more about Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an except from the collection. 

From Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents

Job and Knock 

Chris does the nightshift because no other fucker wants to do it. So he deserves the better money and the fact that they can usually get the job done early doors. It’s what they call job and knock.

Most of the lads are on the iPlayer all night, catching up on the football or Line of Duty or whatever. But they’ve been getting away with it so long they’re even getting bored of the iPlayer.

Why don’t we just go to the boozer for a bit, says Chris, to Phil, the lad he’s on the job with. Phil can’t come up with a reason not to.

Nobody ever mentions management. They’re a joke anyway. Most of these nightshift lads said could have got management jobs if they’d wanted but they couldn’t be arsed with the hassle of going to meetings and all that, they just wanted to crack on with the job.

They started the nightshift at six bells and by eight they went to the boozer. It was only about a thirty-yard walk from the exchange. Months they’d been dragging this job out, on and off.

They went in the pub and it wasn’t like they remembered. Instead of cosy corners and comfy seats it was full of tables and families sat there having meals. Screaming kids all over the place. Both Chris and Phil had enough of that at home. Part of the reason Chris did the nightshift was that he got more kip on the hammock in the back of the van than he did in his own bed.

The pints cost a fortune and of course you had to go outside with your fags as well. Just wasn’t the same. It was like they were deliberately trying to get rid of pubs for the drinker. They were just restaurants that sold the occasional lager now. This boozer didn’t even do Guinness anymore. They always used to have great nights on the Guinness in there.

On the way back to the exchange they stopped at an off licence and picked up a four pack of Foster’s and some fags. Back in the exchange Chris turned on all the lights and they flicked on one after another. They sat there at the tables and then Phil asked if Chris knew the way onto the roof.

Yeah, think so.

Better than being stuck in here. Let’s have a wander up there.

They trailed up the stairs carrying the beer with them and went out through the fire escape and onto the roof. The bright lights of the big city stretched out before them.

Phil went back down and brought a couple of chairs back up and they sat there on the roof smoking and drinking.

This is fucking quality, said Phil.

 

Nice and cool on here as well. Boiling in that exchange.

Better get these beers down us.

Save a couple until tomorrow mate. No sense driving home pissed. One’s enough anyway. It’s like the fucking Shawshank Redemption up here.