UK publisher
PS Publishing LTD has three free titles in the Kindle store today: a collection of short stories, what appears to be a novella and a third that is most likely a novelette.
- Diversifications, by James Lovegrove
James Lovegrove’s second collection of short fiction is a swirling kaleidoscope of ideas, language and wordplay. In this book you will meet robots living in a flesh world, travellers who vie to explore the most exotic alternate dimensions, and viruses that spread by speech. There’s a serial killer who preys on serial killers, a doctor who takes the concept of downsizing to hideous extremes, a hangman coming to terms with his guilt over the executions he performed, and a jogaholic forever trying to atone for the biggest mistake of his life.
From the red plains of Mars to a back-garden party, from modern London as Jules Verne might have imagined it to a futuristic society out of Mary Shelley’s worst nightmares, Lovegrove demonstrates yet again the extraordinary diversity and depth of his talent. Here, from a writer described by the Bookseller as having “become to the 21st century what J.G. Ballard was to the 20th” and by SFX as “one of the UK SF scene’s most interesting, challenging and adventurous authors”, are sixteen unforgettable tales filled with powerful characterisation, vivid storytelling, and dazzling verbal dexterity.
- Cliff Rhodes & The Most Important Journey (The Land at the End of The Working Day), by Peter Crowther
On a windswept corner of Manhattan, just a stone's throw from the weathered facade of the legendary Chelsea Hotel, there's a small two-flight walkdown bar called The Land At The End Of The Working Day. Stop in and rest awhile... you'll meet the most fascinating people.
- The City in These Pages, by John Grant
City Hall is on Lewis-and-Clark Street, so it was the 14th Precinct that got the call, and very soon the 14th Precinct, in the persons of Detective Sergeants Moto and Pincus, was on the spot, bending down and looking into the car at the condom-shrouded figure of Ratty Scarlatti but not touching anything because the m.o. and the scene-of-crime crew hadn't gotten here yet, being stuck in the traffic jam on Eighth thanks to the burst sewer there...
It might seem like just another case for the gallant boys of the 14th but, as the days progress and Moto (look, just don't make any jokes about his name, okay?) and Pincus delve deeper, the body count rises inexorably, with each murder reaching a new height of ludicrous surrealism—if not downright impossibility. It seems there's an avenger on the loose in the enigmatic city.
Yet is the unknown perpetrator truly seeking vengeance. Or are there operators moving at an even deeper level than reality?
John Grant has commented: “I've been a devotee of the works of Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) for decades—since puberty, perhaps longer—so that when the great man died in July 2005 it was almost like losing a family member. I wanted to write my own, very humble tribute to him by way of thanks for all the pleasure he'd given me, but it was some while before the right combination of ideas came along.”
The result, The City in These Pages, is a McBain-style police procedural, full of crackling wit and sharp one-liners, that's also a multi-layered cosmological fantasy in whose shifting perspectives nothing is ever quite as it appears. You've never read anything like it.
