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2026

Day 5: The Age of Calamities ~ Senaa Ahmad

Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn dead, but there’s just one small problem: she’s alive again by morning, sipping tea at the breakfast table. In the gilded hush of the Winter Palace, the Romanov sisters slip through time and waltz aboard a spaceship bound for the stars. A woman on the run strikes a sinister bargain […]

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2026

Day 4: The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories ~ ed. by Arunava Sinha

The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the twentieth century a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant they were being avidly read by millions. Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy which reflected the […]

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2026

Day 3: A Day Like Any Other ~ Guy Ware

A woman with a successful career in child protection is floored by her husband’s sudden death; a retired civil servant smothers his wife, but can’t go through with their pact; a teacher fleeing a disastrous school trip finds himself – literally – in a dark wood. Pascal famously said we shall die alone. But there […]

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2026

Day 2: Devotions ~ Lucy Caldwell

There must be moments when we let go – let go of all that we do, all that we are.’ A young Belfast theatre troupe brings its experimental production of Hamlet to New York. On a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who […]

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2026

Day 1: The Frenzy ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won […]