In 1916, William Manderson, a young poet and infantryman, leaves Liverpool for the Western Front where his older brother Jack is already serving. During the build-up to the great offensive on the Somme, William keeps a journal, sends intimate letters to Jack's wife Elizabeth and writes poetry reflecting his experiences. He longs for news of his close friend and fellow soldier, Matthew Riley, a composer and pianist.

Set during and in the aftermath of the War and moving between Liverpool, France, Wirral and North Wales, Clay vividly evokes period and place. It also conveys with sensitivity both the physical and psychological effects of war injuries and mutilation, as the characters of the novel struggle to cope and readjust. A victim of poison gas, William—half-Welsh and yearning for the Clwydian Hills—attends the dramatic 1917 National Eisteddfod in Birkenhead, a pivotal moment in the story. Turbulent events in post-war Liverpool form the climax to a gripping narrative of endurance, creativity and love.

Shena Mackay is one of the very best short-story writers in the world. As the Guardian said, reviewing her last collection, 'Mackay's observational precision is outstanding; she writes like an angel wielding a scalpel, dissecting her characters with sublime, sharp-edged prose… Her stories are grand entertainment.' Or the Literary Review: 'The heart lifts at the prospect of a collection of stories by Shena Mackay. You can be certain of various elements: laughter, a touch of the blade, underlying shadows, wit, sharpness of perception.'

Her new book, now available in paperback, contains not only thirteen brilliant new stories, but a selection of twenty-three more from her previous collections, making The Atmospheric Railway a delight for her existing admirers and the perfect introduction to her work for newcomers.

Set in an artists' colony in Skagen in Denmark, Painted Ladies is a fictional story based on the actual lives of artists living and working there around the turn of the 20th century. The story centres around Marie Kroyer, who met the famous artist and leading light of the Skagen art movement, Peter Soren Kroyer, when she was a young art student, and married him. The other main character is Anna Ancher, a native of Skagen who married one of the artists at an early age and went on to become herself perhaps the finest artist of them all.

Typically we lie to each other four times a day and the commonest lie told is, 'I'm fine.' The characters in Hot Kitchen Snow go one step further: they lie to themselves. This collection explores the gap between how others see us and how we see ourselves. Teenage Euan is guest of honour at a mystery funeral; door-to-door dog-food seller Greg sets out to find the girl whose life he once saved, to lessen his sense of failure. The tiny everyday decisions that account for some of life's biggest developments are charted here, often represented by a charged scrap from nature: a fall of snow from a skylight reminds a city banker of everything he lacks in 'Hot Kitchen Snow', and in 'Odissi Dancing', scarlet chrysanthemums sewn into a fat college administrator's hair assure her of what she never knew she had. Here the bad do good and the pious wreak havoc. No one is as they seem or as they think they are.

It's Christmas morning. Happily married Alice is stuffing a turkey and having improper thoughts about a colleague. Soon children, relatives, in-laws, exes and strays will gather at her house for Christmas Day, to eat too much, drink too much and exchange insufficiently impressive gifts.They'll also exchange slights, hurts, animosities, crushes and secrets—big, big secrets—and by Boxing Day nothing will be the same. Will love save the day? Is blood thicker than water? Or are families just the world's biggest nightmare? A blackly funny, tender dissection of the meaning of love—family love, sibling love, children love—Comfort and Joy will make you laugh and cry.

The disquieting novella-length title piece in this extraordinary collection is told by the owner of a house for sale: 'Today is my 31st birthday but I have struggled to find a mirror in a room which is open to me. In the end I looked in the toaster unable to tell whether the stains and blemishes were on the stainless steel of the appliance or the stainless steel of my face. My hair is still its natural colour. Natural. That is not a word many people would use about me. Abnormal. Dysfunctional. Difficult was a favourite when I was young.' As prospective buyers are shown around, each room gives away a piece of the strange, disturbing and compelling narrative.

Complemented by short stories that crackle with wit and strangeness this is a brilliant debut collection.

The Winds of Heaven is a 1955 novel about 'a widow, rising sixty, with no particular gifts or skills, shunted from one to the other of her more or less unwilling daughters on perpetual uneasy visits, with no prospect of her life getting anything but worse' (Afterword). One daughter is the socially ambitious Miriam living in commuter belt with her barrister husband and children; one is Eva, an aspiring actress in love with a married man; and the third is Anne, married to a rough but kindly Bedfordshire smallholder who is the only one who treats Louise with more than merely dutiful sympathy. The one relation with whom she has any empathy is her grandchild.

Monica Dickens (1915 - 1992) had the knack of writing about ordinariness while making the reader unable to put her books down. It is about family relationships: it seems rather cruel that all three of Louise's daughters are so harsh to her but that, Monica Dickens is saying, is the way of the world. Preface by A. S. Byatt.