This polyphonic collection of twenty-five stories presents a multitude of Malaysian perspectives spanning age, gender, and class. Yow char kwai hawkers compete for customers on a busy city street. Marital dynamics unfurl at an abortion clinic. On an island, a man's infatuation with a veiled woman takes a supernatural turn. A woman writes to her brother about their dead cat. Characters in these stories connect through chance encounters and fateful events. Their narratives are inevitably coloured by the social tension and occasional absurdities of a multicultural society. Shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.

The Sum of Our Follies is a novel set in Lubok Sayong, an imaginary Malaysian town. Two narrators describe Lubok Sayong and its community of quirky inhabitants. The first is Auyong, a retiree from the city who operates a lychee factory in Lubok Sayong. The other is eleven-year-old Mary Anne, an orphan who is taken in by an irascible woman in charge of the Big House. Through anecdotes and gentle humour, the two narrators observe the events that change the town and their lives as modernity sets in and Mary Anne grows up.

Like pebbles dropped in a pond, acts of courage, love, and faith create ripples that extend far and wide. In this gift edition, poignant stories of people from all walks of life demonstrate the principle of giving and receiving. Contributors include Fred Rogers, James Robinson, and Florence Littauer.

How might a small decision you make, an action you take, a phone call you initiate change your path? Impact other lives? Months after spying a bottle wedged into a fallen cottonwood snag in the Columbia River, Ernest pulls it from the river. The bottle's note connects Ernest, an old man living in a tiny Oregon town, to teenage Annie, provoking a mysterious and sudden friendship between Ernest's daughter Amelia with Sarah, the daughter of the most recent resident of the home Annie once occupied. The two middle-aged women's quest to learn more about Annie and her secret introduces readers to stories about family members through backstory, and introduces new characters, all connected through the finding of the bottle. Together, Amelia and Sarah explore their unfinished business with their mothers, intimate relationships, and regrets over life choices as they embark on their personal searches for something bigger in their very different lives.

This dream-like work dwells on memory and family, and follows ambiguous figures that stride through the snowy lands adjacent to the realm of the dead. Hagiwara Rei explores the processing of grief, and how cyclical mechanisms of human emotion map out a geography of memory inextricably intertwined with the natural world from which we spring. Prepare to be absorbed in a work unlike any other coming out now.

After the success of her collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Vandana Singh returns to the short story in Ambiguity Machines. Her deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that consider and celebrate this world and others, with characters who try to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past. And in ‘Requiem,’ a major new novella, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance. Examining the revolutionary potential of speculative fiction, Singh dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within to explore the ways in which we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.

Dark, unnerving, and wickedly funny, Patrick McGrath’s acclaimed short stories deal in the bizarre, the erotic, and the unexpected. A failed writer meets an ageing gin-queen who claims he was once visited by an angel; a little girl finds a delirious, dying explorer from the Congo at the bottom of her back garden; a nightclub is terrorized by a strange libidinous hand; and a young Victorian lady sails to India to find her fiancé Cecil horribly transformed...