検索キーワード： 文芸小説

百人を超える死者を出した列車事故。原因は、踏切内に進入した飲酒運転の車だった。危険運転致死傷罪はまだなく、運転していた男の刑期はたったの五年。目の前で死んでいった顔見知りの女子高生、失った自分の右腕。元駅員は復讐を心に誓うが……（表題作）。

「開け，ゴマ」の呪文で有名な「アリババと，女奴隷に殺された四十人の盗賊の話」，魔法の馬に乗って空を飛び，ベンガルの王女に出会ったペルシアの王子の話，美しい妖精と結婚した王子の話，

Five full-cast dramas by the celebrated Scottish writer Liz Lochhead, plus a short story. Liz Lochhead is a widely recognised poet, playwright and performer. She was the Makar, Scotland’s national poet, between 2011 and 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015. The six pieces in this anthology are characterised by their evocative language and focus on different facets of female identity: from schoolgirls, wives and mothers to convention-defying creators and ‘cunning women’.

An award-winning debut about a young woman who lands an internship at the most popular supermarket chain in the Canary Islands, a role that proves at turns humorous and soul-crushing and reflects the daily struggles of a new generation entering the workforce, for fans of Really Good, Actually and The New Me.

Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern; a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind: trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone. Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world.

“Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance.

In 1741, thirty-two-year-old naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller joins Captain Bering's Great Northern Expedition to scout out a sea route from Asia to America. Plagued with hardships, captain and crew never reach their goal, but they do make a unique discovery, a gentle giant that will be named for the young explorer who described it: Steller’s sea cow. In 1859, the governor of the Russian territory of Alaska sends his men to seek the skeleton of the massive marine mammal rumored to have vanished a hundred years before, while his sister curates the settlement’s natural science collection.

When twenty-seven-year-old Yeon-hwa loses her grandmother, enigmatic and distant proprietor of the Hwawoldang, she decides to respect her wishes by keeping the store going for at least another month, between the hours of 10pm and midnight. She has never learnt to make the traditional desserts herself, and hopes to learn more about her grandmother in the process. On her very first day at work, she is soon interrupted by one of her grandmother’s most regular visitors, who hints that Hwawoldang is no ordinary pastry shop, and its customers not entirely alive…

As opening night nears for a local amateur production, the cast begin to realise that the real drama is taking place off-stage -- and in life there's no such thing as a dress rehearsal ... When Edward Bull agreed to direct the amateur production of Death by Dying, he thought it would take his mind off his wife's recent affair. He was soon to discover, however, that all the real drama was taking place off-stage ...

On this final day of his life, Nils takes the boat out for the last time. In fact, he seems to be somewhere in between life and death already as he is reunited with his old dog, Luna. The passengers that come on and get off are all dead, too. They are people he has transported through a long life as a ferryman, and they board the ferry just as they were when he knew them. Gradually we also get Nils' own story, and above all the story of his marriage to a woman he loved very much.

When Meredith flies home to New England, daughter Eloise in tow, she leaves her husband and a life back in LA. A heartbreaking loss is killing their marriage. So she looks to her mother and siblings for the support she desperately needs, and the love her daughter surely deserves—two things her husband can’t seem to provide. Meredith’s mother, Delia, is thrilled by their sudden arrival at the family farm. But her husband braces for the chaos his stepdaughter and granddaughter will surely bring.

Jo Sorsby knows she’s hiding from her past when she agrees to run her uncle’s beloved stationery shop. Glimpsing the lives of her customers between the warm wooden shelves, as they scribble little notes and browse colorful notebooks, distracts her from her bruised heart. When she meets Ruth, a vicar running from a secret, and Malcolm, a septuagenarian still finding himself, she suddenly realizes she isn’t alone.

“I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.” These words from Josephine, the heroine of Jennifer Dawson’s remarkable novel, encapsulate the journey of a young woman grappling with mental illness amidst the hallowed halls of Oxford University in the 1950s. Originally published in 1961, this novel met with critical acclaim, and is a rediscovered classic perfect for fans of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

An upcoming book to be published by Penguin Random House.

Our narrator’s name and origins are unknown. Oliver, who has served as both her caregiver and her captor, told her she came to him from another star. Though she arrived a grown woman, she did not yet have the ability to speak or count. Oliver had to teach her how to properly chew her food and clean herself. Though isolated from our world, he did his best to care for his charge and, she insists, always felt the need to develop her into more than she was.

The billionaire Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles is your typical American family, with power-struggling aunties, emasculated uncles, scheming cousins, scandalous secrets and a fortune teller on retainer. But at the end of each combative day, the Suns are chained together with golden handcuffs, whether they like it or not. Yet strange storms are a-brewing. Their matriarch, Roses Sun, is grappling with an existential crisis: she must produce a male heir that bears the clan's surname.

At the crossroads of his life, Lipsha Morrissey is summoned by his grandmother to return to the reservation. There, he falls in love for the very first time—with the beautiful Shawnee Ray, who’s already considering a marriage proposal from Lipsha’s wealthy entrepreneurial boss, Lyman Lamartine. But when all efforts to win Shawnee’s affections go hopelessly awry, Lipsha seeks out his great-grandmother for a magical solution to his romantic dilemma—on sacred ground where a federally sanctioned bingo palace is slated for construction.

The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It’s a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens. It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows.

Hidden away in Tokyo's Ginza district lies Shihodo, a hidden gem known only to insiders, with an abundant selection of fine stationery. Behind its counter stands Ken Takarada, the enigmatic shop owner whose warm presence draws those seeking more than just beautiful paper and colourful inks. To this shop come more customers with worries weighing on their hearts: a young girl being bullied by her classmates, a salary man facing the lonely prospect of retirement.