Meta X Fiction

In the ultimate armchair explorer's guidebook to international literature, low and high cultures collide on this sometimes harsh, sometimes funny literary roadmap.

A fictional take on a factual friendship between eminent Victorian writer Charles Dickens and his protégé Wilkie Collins as they team up with a police inspector to investigate the brutal murder of a gentleman.

Through stations and churches, pubs and theatres, follow in the footsteps of some of the world’s literary giants with this bookish tour of London.

One misplaced comma, or an accidental apostrophe, and intended meaning can turn on its head. Use this gently humorous guide to safely cross the perceived minefield of punctuation.

Robin Cooper is many things to many people (depending on who he’s writing to). From gardening catalogues to ball bearing manufacturers, no-one is safe from his absurdly hilarious letters, and their subsequently delightful replies.

What does language do for you? What does it do with you? What does it do to you? In this fantastic follow-up to her award-winning ‘Confession Of A Barefaced Woman’, Allison Joseph explores her — sometimes unrequited — love of language.

From two masters of the mystery genre comes a hard-boiled Mike Hammer PI story about the alleged ledger of a dead crime boss — documenting every deal he ever made.

Three haunted women from small-town West Virginia take a road trip to the desert of Abiquiu in search of escape. A journey through letters from an orphan to her aunt’s dead lover, it’s both an epistolary road-trip novel and a meditation on love.

In the lawless town of Santa Mondega, no-one survives reading "The Book With No Name". So there’s only one way to find out why…

A crucial cultural profession is under threat from price-cutting retailers. Economic injustice sees the super-rich get richer and the rest get poorer. For anyone concerned about the fate of literature, this fascinating book juxtaposes accounts of writers during the Great Depression with insights into today’s literary scene.

A children’s bookseller who seems to hate children. Someone stealing stacks of beautiful books every Saturday and threatening to put the bookshop out of business. Tess is a book lover, a mum and a private investigator who’ll take on the case pro bono to see the bookseller smile again.

In the back room of his bookstore, slumped over a heavy carton of Agatha Christie novels, Mr Ripple’s death is no mystery. But in the very same room, the ‘Friends Of England’, with their mob connections, continue to meet. And Mr Ripple’s assistant is suspicious…

Avery Sharecross thought he’d exchanged tracking down criminals for sourcing rare books, but when a New Mexico book collector is bludgeoned to death on the floor of his family library, the former cop turned bookseller is called in to read between the lines.

On an errand for his Parisian bookshop boss, Ronald Hastie meets an eccentric collector who claims possession of two unpublished works by his thesis subject, Robert Louis Stevenson, including the first draft of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde. Can it be true?

In the sexist, elitist and sometimes classist voice of her parody Twitter account @GuyInYourMFA, Dana Schwartz collates short, satirical biographies of male writers in the great, white, Western literary canon.

This illuminating collection of nineteen interviews with fiction-writing luminaries shines a light on the complete writing process, from story arcs and viewpoint to writing courses and mentoring.

Inheriting her mother’s ailing bookstore and responsibility for her declining Grandpa Andrew, Natalie Harper plans to shut up shop, sell the building and put him into assisted care. But there’s a problem: Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. Natalie adores her Grandpa so with the help of Peach Gallagher, the past gets lost and Natalie’s future gets found.

Rare book dealer Daniel Pike calls in Private Investigator Jack Kiley to validate the provenance of purported pulp fiction by a deceased Modernist poet. Jack spent his policing career filtering fact from fiction but can the PI perceive poetry from pulp?

On 29th April 1986, someone set fire to the Los Angeles Public Library destroying more than 400,000 books. Thirty years later, the mystery still remains: who set fire to the library and why would someone do it?

1920’s London. Factory girl Kate Goss has lost her mother and her father has vanished. Falling into the brutal hands of the local money lender, Kate gets a cleaning job in a most unusual bookshop — where anyone can learn to read and buy books cheaply. But as the pages of this new world open up, so too do new dangers.