Category Short stories

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Books to look out for in 2026 – fiction

Maggie O’Farrell, Yann Martel and Julian Barnes are among the authors publishing new novels this year

The beginning of the books calendar is usually dominated by debuts, but January 2026 sees releases from some of the year’s biggest authors. Known for his surreally bittersweet short stories, George Saunders has written only one novel so far – but that one won the Booker prize. The follow-up to 2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil (Bloomsbury) focuses on an unquiet spirit called Jill who helps others pass over from life to whatever comes next. She is called to the deathbed of an oil tycoon who is rapidly running out of time to face up to his ecological crimes, in a rallying cry for human connection and environmental action. Ali Smith’s Glyph (Hamish Hamilton) is a companion to 2024’s Gliff, and promises to tell a story initially hidden in that previous novel. Expect fables, siblings, phantoms and horses in a typically playful shout of resistance against war, genocide and the increasingly hostile social discourse. And in Departure(s) (Jonathan Cape), Julian Barnes announces his own – this blend of memoir and fiction, exploring memory, illness, mortality and love across the decades, will be his last book. “Your presence has delighted me,” he assures the reader. “Indeed, I would be nothing without you.”

The Hamnet adaptation hits UK cinemas in January, but Maggie O’Farrell’s next novel isn’t out until June. Land (Tinder), a multigenerational saga which opens in 19th-century Ireland in the wake of the famine, is inspired by her own family history and centres on a man tasked with mapping the country for the Ordnance Survey. There’ll be much anticipation, too, for The Things We Never Say from Elizabeth Strout (Viking, May). The ultra-prolific Strout is adored for her interconnected novels, but this story of a man with a secret is a standalone, introducing characters we’ve never met before. In John of John (Picador, May) Douglas Stuart, author of much-loved Booker winner Shuggie Bain, portrays a young gay man returning home from art school to the lonely croft on the Hebridean island where he grew up. And September sees a new novel from Irish writer Sebastian Barry: The Newer World (Faber) follows Costa winner Days Without End and A Thousand Moons in transporting the reader to late 19th-century America in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Continue reading...

‘He was just trying to earn a few kopecks’: how newly translated stories reveal Chekhov’s silly side

With daft jokes and experimental wordplay, the first comprehensive translations of his lesser-known stories show Anton Chekhov in a new light

Few writers are as universally admired as Chekhov. As Booker winner George Saunders puts it, “Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.” Novelists from Ann Patchett to Zadie Smith cite him as an inspiration. His plays The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard still pack out theatres internationally. In the past year alone, Andrew Scott wowed audiences in his one-man Vanya for London’s National Theatre and Cate Blanchett took on the role of Arkadina in The Seagull at the Barbican. But how much did you know about his silly side?

Anton Chekhov: Earliest Stories offers the first comprehensive translation in English of the stories, novellas and humoresques that the Russian author wrote in the early 1880s. And it is supremely juvenile in the best way. The reason many of these stories are now appearing in translation for the first time is because, explains editor Rosamund Bartlett, they have never been regarded by commercial publishers as “worthy” of Chekhov’s reputation. They are too childishly comical. During the translation process, she says, “we would just collapse in fits of giggles”.

Continue reading...

Jeeves Again review – new Jeeves and Wooster stories by celebrity fans

This collection of new short stories about Bertie and his valet pays homage to the genius of PG Wodehouse – just in time for Christmas

As with most of the giants of late 19th- and early 20th-century English literature, the vast majority of PG Wodehouse’s readers today are non-white. Perhaps it was brutal colonial indoctrination that ensured the modern descendants of the aspirant imperial middle classes from Barbados to Burma, with their tea caddies, gin-stuffed drinks cabinets and yellowing Penguin paperbacks, still devour Maugham, Shaw and Kipling. Perhaps they just have good taste.

Wodehouse’s detractors are many – Stephen Sondheim (“archness … tweeness … flimsiness”), Winston Churchill (“He can live secluded in some place or go to hell as soon as there is a vacant passage”), the Inland Revenue – but for millions around the world he remains the greatest comic writer Britain has ever produced. And he clearly still sells here, as this collection of a dozen new officially sanctioned stories by writers, comedians and celebrity admirers, out in time to be a stocking filler, attests.

Continue reading...

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie – a haunting coda to a groundbreaking career

From an afterlife fantasy to a tale of loss in Mumbai, death is a recurring theme in this story collection – an echo of the novelist at his peak

Towards the end of Knife, his 2024 book about the assault at a public event in upstate New York that blinded him in his right eye, Salman Rushdie offers a thought experiment:

Imagine that you knew nothing about me, that you had arrived from another planet, perhaps, and had been given my books to read, and you had never heard my name or been told anything about my life or about the attack on The Satanic Verses in 1989. Then, if you read my books in chronological order, I don’t believe you would find yourself thinking, Something calamitous happened to this writer’s life in 1989. The books are their own journey.

Continue reading...

‘They disappeared when the wall came down’: German author Jenny Erpenbeck on the objects that contain vast histories

From the drip catchers of coffee pots to the typewriter she used for her first works, the International Booker prize-winning writer reflects on the hidden significance of everyday items

Drip catcher
The carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced – when the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, when the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.

The shop where I used to take my tights to get them mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a little girl – a shop called “Run Express” – disappeared when the Wall came down and the west was able to sell its cheap tights in the east.

Continue reading...

The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee review – newly discovered stories from an American great

If we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But these juvenile stories and essays shed fascinating light on the repression of Lee’s early life

When a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft. The publication was also surrounded by controversy over whether the aged Lee, by then seriously disabled, had really consented to its publication.

This new book, The Land of Sweet Forever, is a much more conventional enterprise: a collection of Lee’s unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. No deception is being practised here, and if people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren’t diehard fans.

Continue reading...

‘Provocative’ story about British Museum statue wins 4thWrite prize

Piyumi Kapugeekiyana’s tale explores repatriation and cultural ownership through a replica of the goddess Tārā
• Read the winning story: The Original Is Not Here

A story exploring cultural ownership through the eyes of a museum curator has won this year’s 4thWrite prize.

Piyumi Kapugeekiyana was announced as the winner of the prize at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening.

Continue reading...

Debut author Colwill Brown wins BBC short story award for ‘heartbreaking’ tale – read an extract here

Brown’s story of a teenage life ‘critically damaged in a moment’ was the ‘unanimous’ pick for the £15,000 prize
• Read an extract from the story below

Doncaster-born writer Colwill Brown has won this year’s BBC national short story award for a “heartbreaking” entry about shame and the long-term effects of trauma, told in South Yorkshire dialect.

Brown was announced as the winner of the £15,000 award, run in collaboration with Cambridge University, at a ceremony held at BBC Broadcasting House on Tuesday evening.

Continue reading...

‘She wrote the best first line – and the most chilling stories’: Stephen King on the dark brilliance of Daphne du Maurier

From Rebecca to The Birds and scores of creepy short stories, Du Maurier was queen of the uncanny, writes the US horror maestro

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It’s one of the most well-known first lines ever written in a novel. Certainly the most memorable; I used it myself as an epigram in my novel Bag of Bones. Daphne du Maurier also wrote what may be the best first line in a tale of the uncanny and outre. Her classic story The Birds opens with this: “On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.” Short, chilly and to the point. It could almost be a weather report.

It works so well at the outset of the gripping tale that follows, in which every species of bird attacks humankind, because it’s flat, declarative and realistic. Du Maurier can gin up horror when she wants – see The Doll, The Blue Lenses and the shocking final two pages of Don’t Look Now – but knows that what’s wanted here to instil belief (and suspense) is a tone that’s closer to reportage than narration.

Continue reading...

From shocking short stories to a talking foetus: Ian McEwan’s 10 best books – ranked!

As the author’s future-set novel, What We Can Know, hits shelves, we assesses his top 10 works – from chilling short stories to Booker prize-winning satire

Two old friends, composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, meet at the funeral of charismatic Molly Lane, a former lover of both men (along with many other successful men of the time). This sharp 90s satire – the Conservatives have been in power for 17 years – has the misfortune of being McEwan’s only novel to win the Booker prize in his 50-year career, despite being widely considered one of his slightest. But it fizzes along like the champagne that is part of the euthanasia pact hatched by the two men in a plot that even the author conceded was “rather improbable”. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani was right when she concluded that it was testament to the author’s skill that he had managed “to toss off a minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb” to win the gong he had so long deserved.

Continue reading...