Celebrate the magic of the holiday season with a little Regency romance! Originally published in separate anthologies, and out-of-print for many years, these Christmas-themed novellas by legendary Regency romance author Barbara Metzger are in one volume for the first time ever! This collection includes the following stories: Greetings of the Season The Proof Is in the Pudding Three Good Deeds Christmas Wish List Little Miracles

Especially for you, Fiona tells us about the special inspiration behind the stories and what they mean to her: Season's Greetings Receiving the annual round robin from friends is a Christmas tradition I devour with the same indulgent pleasure as the green triangles in the Quality Street box. Season's Greetings tells Holly's story through a decade of Christmas letters. The Nativity Scene I'm now proud to count myself among the ranks of tear-stained parents who hold camera phones wonkily aloft at the school nativity play each year. In The Nativity Scene, the under 9s in home-made wings are not the only ones for whom the day could spell high drama. Dine Out On It When I was moving house a lot in the nineties and noughties, I clung onto spare front door keys as a keepsake. Dine Out On It came from seeing the clutch of Yales swinging on a hook at the back of a cupboard, and wondering what would happen if I ever tried them out again. Elizabeth Elizabeth was written for a Sunday newspaper at a time my heart regularly came unglued when falling in love without a safety net. I loved the idea of a complete reinvention, and the secret hope that somebody would one day find my leopard's spots beneath the whitewash. Freudian Slips This story was inspired by something a friend of mine did, and the image of lipstick on cricket whites was so heavenly, I just had to write Freudian Slips . . . Plus bonus content! This collection contains the first three chapters from Fiona's bestselling novel The Summer Wedding.

An accomplished writer, Borowski's collection of holiday stories is memorable and heart tugging. This is the second book in a series; the first "The Christmas Heart" has been acclaimed as a great gift for everyone.

Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, has long been considered an important and vibrant, even controversial, storyteller and poet. The Wish House and Other Stories is a collection of Kipling’s finest works, including the stories “In the House of Suddhoo,” “The Disturber of Traffic,” and “The Eye of Allah,” the poems “The Runners,” “The Return of the Children,” and “The Last Ode,” and his famous story about Afghanistan, “The Man Who Would Be King.” Each piece was selected by poet and scholar Craig Raine, who writes in his Preface, “We need to think about Kipling. He is our greatest short-story writer, but one whose achievement is more complex and surprising than even his admirers recognize.”

Turning her back on what is considered conventional, Makhosazana Xaba engages with her subject-matter on a revolutionary level in Running and Other Stories. She takes tradition be that literary tradition, cultural tradition, gender tradition and re-imagines it in a way that is liberating and innovative. Bracketed by Xabas revisitings of Can Thembas influential short story, The Suit, the ten stories in this collection, while strongly independent, are in conversation with one another, resulting in a collection that can be devoured all at once or savoured slowly, story by story. By re-envisioning the ordinary and accepted, Xaba is creating a space in which womens voices are given a rebirth.

Despite the political instability characterizing twentieth-century Taiwan, the value of baseball in the lives of Taiwanese has been a constant since the game was introduced in 1895. The game first gained popularity on the island under the Japanese occupation, and that popularity continued after World War II despite the withdrawal of the Japanese and an official lack of support from the new state power, the Chinese Nationalist Party.

Reproduction of the original: The Safety Curtain and Other Stories by Ethel M. Dell

Reproduction of the original: Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories by Arthur Christopher Benson

Reproduction of the original: In a Steamer Chair and Other Stories by Robert Barr