Dystopian & Alternative History Fiction

What if the course of history had been changed by a different decision, a different victor, a different invention? Utopian stories and alternative history stories by H.G. Wells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Castello Holford and others are combined here with new stories by new writers from open submissions, exploring the variety and delight of alternative history to reimagine the world around us: What if the Ancient Egyptians had conquered Rome? What if World War II had been won by the loser, not the victors? What if women had ruled the world for 4000 years not men? New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: Essa Bah, Rebecca Buchanan, Monica Butler, Jay Caselberg, Jonathan Davidson, Evan A. Davis, C.R. Hobson, Vylar Kaftan, Richard Kigel, Andrea Kriz, Adam Lawson, Kwame M.A. McPherson, Eve Morton, Chiamaka Muoneke, Maureen O'Leary, Jennifer R. Povey, Guy Prevost, Matias F. Travieso-Diaz, Rebecca E. Treasure, DJ Tyrer, Iris Whelan, Cameron Wise-Maas, Alex Woodroe, James Young, and Elizabeth Zuckerman. These appear alongside classic stories by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Castello Holford, H.G. Wells, and John Wyndham. The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.

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The gripping thriller from the bestselling author of VOX and Q ‘A compelling, fast paced read.’ Guardian ‘The queen of dystopia’ Nina Pottell, Prima ‘Explosive’ Heat 'Provocative, sinister, and fascinating' Stephanie Wrobel, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Recovery of Rose Gold ‘Clever and chilling – and all too plausible’ Carole Johnstone, author of Mirrorland * * * * * * * * * * * Miranda Reynolds has lost her home, her job and her husband – all thanks to an economic collapse that has brought America to its knees. The shops are empty; the streets no longer safe. Miranda and her daughter Emma have nowhere left to turn. There is one final hope, a self-sufficient haven for women who want to live a life free from men. Femlandia. For Miranda, the secluded Femlandia is a last resort. Life outside the gates is fraught with danger, but there’s something just as sinister going on within. Welcome to Femlandia… It’s no place like home. * * * * * * * * * * * What readers are saying about FEMLANDIA 'I felt immediately pulled in and intrigued…I cannot wait to see what is going to come next from this author' 'It was completely gripping and I couldn't put it down; absolutely thought provoking' ‘A chilling and layered read which I couldn't put down. A true modern horror which exposes the dangers of a world without gender equity and ends with a horrifying sense of circularity.’ ‘I couldn’t stop reading. There were many shocking twists throughout the book and I loved how it flicked between characters and timelines!’ ‘Well-written, thought provoking and challenging’

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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE starring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and John BoyegaTHE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - a dark, thrilling and unputdownable novel about our obsession with the internet'Prepare to be addicted' Daily Mail'A gripping and highly unsettling read' Sunday Times'The Circle is 'Brave New World' for our brave new world... Fast, witty and troubling' Washington PostWhen Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails, social media, and finances with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of transparency. Mae can't believe her great fortune to work for them - even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public ...Pre-order the electrifying follow up to The Circle now . . . The Every is coming November 2021.'An elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st Century' Vanity Fair'Immensely readable and very timely' Metro'Prescient, important and enjoyable . . . a deft modern synthesis of Swiftian wit with Orwellian prognostication' Guardian

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In an alternate reality a lot like our world, every person's physical size is directly proportional to their wealth. The poorest of the poor are the size of rats, and billionaires are the size of skyscrapers.Warner and his sister Prayer are destitute - and tiny. Their size is not just demeaning but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger, richer people don't ever have to think about, from being mauled by cats to their house getting stepped on. There are no cars or phones built small enough for them, or schools or hospitals, for that matter - there's no point, when no one that little has any purchasing power, and when salaried doctors and teachers would never fit in buildings so small. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them?Brilliant, warm and funny, this is a social novel for our times in the tradition of 1984 or the work of Douglas Adams.

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Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021The #1 Sunday Times BestsellerFeatured in Barack Obama's Summer Reading List 2021'This is a novel for fans of Never Let Me Go . . . tender, touching and true.' The Times'The Sun always has ways to reach us.'From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.In Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?'Beautiful' Guardian 'Flawless' The Times 'Devastating' FT 'Another masterpiece' Observer

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'The best single work of science fiction yet written' Ursula K. Le GuinThe dystopian masterwork that inspired George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, We depicts a futuristic totalitarian society, 'OneState', where humans have become numbers. Suppressed in Russia for decades, it is a chilling vision of a world enslaved by technology.'Zamyatin's parable looked forward to climate change and surveillance culture ... to peer into its future is to see modernity's reflection gazing darkly back' Economist

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Jeffrey Lockhart has been summoned to The Convergence: a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely, cryogenically controlled.He is there to say goodbye to his stepmother, Artis, who has chosen to surrender her dying body; preserving it until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return her to a life of transcendent promise. And his healthy father, Ross, might join her.Hypnotic and seductive, Don DeLillo's Zero K is a visionary novel about the legacies we leave, the nobility of death, and the ultimate worth of 'the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.'

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The Eusistocratic Republic of Finland has bred a new human sub-species of receptive, submissive women, called eloi, for sex and procreation, while intelligent, independent women are relegated to menial labour and sterilized. Vanna, raised as an eloi but secretly intelligent, needs money to help her doll-like sister, Manna.Vanna forms a friendship with a man named Jare, and they become involved in buying and selling a stimulant known to the Health Authority to be extremely dangerous: chilli peppers. Then Manna disappears, and Jare comes across a strange religious cult in possession of the Core of the Sun, a chilli so hot that it is rumoured to cause hallucinations. Does this chilli have effects that justify its prohibition? How did Finland turn into the North Korea of Europe? And will Vanna succeed in her quest to find her sister, or will her growing need to satisfy her chilli addiction destroy her? Johanna Sinisalo's tautly told story of fight and flight is also a feisty, between-the-lines social polemic - a witty, inventive, and fiendishly engaging read from the queen of 'Finnish Weird'.

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Introduced by Patricia Lockwood: Gothic tales from the mistress of the weird behind frogman-romance Mrs Caliban for fans of Shirley Jackson, Lucia Berlin and Patricia Highsmith.'Wonderful.' Margaret Atwood'Genius.' Patricia Lockwood'Remarkable.' Joseph Heller'Perfect.' Max Porter''Immensely skillful'. Ursula K. Le Guin'Tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James'One of the greatest short story writers we have.' The Times'You are in masterly hands as Ingalls lures you into a swamp of violence and magic.' Sunday TimesAfter a one-night-stand with the Angel Gabriel, a monk is transformed into a pregnant woman.Lost in the fog, two visitors are lured into a ruined candlelit mansion.A wife confiscates her husband's homemade sex doll, only to demand her own.Great-aunts warn of the deadly skin of the pearlkillers.Rachel Ingalls' incomparable novellas are masterpieces: surrealist, subversive, tragicomic. Prepare to meet what lurks beneath .'Macabre, fantastic and haunting . . . One of the most brilliant practitioners of American Gothic since Poe . . . Read her at your peril.' Independent'Fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness . . . In her vision of intimacy and interdependence, you're simply not safe until everybody else is dead . . . Brilliant.' New Yorker'Resists definition . . . Her work combines subtlety and horror, magic and stark realism, Greek tragedy and happily-ever-afters . . . Rare and fine. ' Guardian'Idiosyncratic, haunting, masterly . . . A modern fabulist making myths which explode into strangeness.' Observer

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An official tie-in edition of Philip K. Dick's dazzling speculative novel to accompany the new TV series, executive produced by Ridley Scott. Philip K. Dick's acclaimed cult novel gives us a horrifying glimpse of an alternative world - one where the Allies have lost the Second World War. In this nightmare dystopia the Nazis have taken over New York, the Japanese control California and the African continent is virtually wiped out. In a neutral buffer zone in America that divides the world's new rival superpowers, lives the author of an underground bestseller. His book offers a new vision of reality - an alternative theory of world history in which the Axis powers were defeated - giving hope to the disenchanted. Does 'reality' lie with him, or is his world just one among many others?'The most brilliant science fiction mind on any planet'Rolling Stone'Dick's finest book, and one of the very best science fiction novels ever published'Eric Brown

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NOW AN AMAZON ORIGINAL SERIES'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.'America, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The winning Axis powers have divided their spoils: the Nazis control New York, while California is ruled by the Japanese. But between these two states - locked in a cold war - lies a neutal buffer zone in which legendary author Hawthorne Abendsen is rumoured to live. Abendsen lives in fear of his life for he has written a book in which World War Two was won by the Allies. . .

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*The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller**Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021**A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick*'A delicate, haunting story' The Washington Post'This is a novel for fans of Never Let Me Go . . . tender, touching and true.' The Times'The Sun always has ways to reach us.'From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.In Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

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WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARD FOR SHORT STORY OF THE YEAR 2023'ONE OF MY FAVOURITE STORYTELLERS. THESE TALES LINGERED, MORPHED, CONSUMED ME'KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE'QUEER, HORNY, GORY, FANTASTICAL STORIES THAT GAVE ME SERIOUS WRITER ENVY'KIRSTY LOGANThe belly-groan of a face unpeeled. A break-up poem recited knee-deep in bog water. An ancient burial mound rising and falling like a chest. The ghost of Stephen Gately reading the ingredients on a ham and cheese sandwich.Startling, sinister and irresistibly joyful, Moïra Fowley's debut collection unravels all of our darkest impulses and deepest fears.'SUCH A WITTY, AFFECTING, FRESH BOOK: I WAS DELICIOUSLY HORRIFIED'JENN ASHWORTH

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The gripping story of what it's like to be the daughter of a woman who changed the world - perfect for fans of The Power and VoxA BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK AND KINDLE NO. 1 BESTSELLER 'Engrossing and original. The Silence Project will get people talking' Bernardine Evaristo Mother. Martyr. Murderer. On Emilia Morris's thirteenth birthday, her mother Rachel moves into a tent at the bottom of their garden. From that day on, she never says another word.Inspired by Rachel's example, other women join her and together they build the Community. Eight years later, Rachel and thousands of her followers shock the world as they silence themselves forever.In the aftermath of what comes to be known as the Event, the Community's global influence quickly grows. As a result, the whole world has an opinion about Rachel - whether they see her as a callous monster or a heroic martyr - but Emilia has never voiced hers publicly. Until now. Readers can't stop shouting about The Silence Project: 'A true masterpiece' ***** 'One hell of a book!' ***** 'Had me hooked' ***** 'Red-hot' ***** 'I don't think I've ever read a book as quickly' ***** 'Gave me the shivers' *****

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