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The pursuit of fashion is a matter of life and death in the debut novel from Christianna Brand, one of the Queens of Golden Age crime fiction. Life in the West End dress shop Christophe et Cie is hard enough with all the pressures of delivering Frank Bevan's business vision and then comes murder, delivered by oxalic acid, transforming the boutique into a crime scene. Featuring a colourful cast of designers, models, shop floor assistants and the fresh-faced Inspector Charlesworth, this 1941 mystery brims with Brand's signature wit and ruthless twists.

Throughout history, people have wanted to conquer, plot and travel across with the world in two-dimensions. From the murky origins of human's earliest past times, where fortune-telling and play blur, to modern ventures into Monopoly, boardgames have shaped everything from how we conduct war to the art we create. What is it that makes them so addictive, so constantly inviting to playful reinterpretation and reinvention? Caroline Taggart brings her signature warmth and wit to The Philosophy of Boardgames, a playful cultural history that lays the checkered past of boardgames bare. Covering various subgenres of games including: Early games, Race games, Chess, Combat games, Puzzles games, Word games, Quiz games, Role-playing games, and Collaborative games.

Step right up to see the enchanted Ferris wheel whose magical gifts are to die for! Marvel at the man-eating menagerie and dreadful secrets of 'Satan's Circus'! Behold the nightmare waxworks of Mrs. Groby's Chamber of Horrors!Carnivals and sideshows are settings closely entwined with the history of horror cinema, but in the realms of literature, there is a strain of uncanny fairground fiction with even deeper roots. Home to a sinister troupe of conjurers, puppeteers, beast tamers and crowds baying for blood beneath the Big Top, the performance spaces of these classic weird tales are borderlands where the unearthly meets the darker cravings of the human heart. Presenting sixteen sensational short stories, hailing from Edgar Allan Poe's 1840s through to Robert Aickman's 1960s, Edward Parnell invites you to enjoy a cavalcade of uneasy thrills courtesy of Gerald Kersh, Ray Bradbury, Margery Lawrence and many more.

The literary life isn't just about curling up with a good book and a cuppa, it's also a world where Lord Byron calls John Keats' work "p**s-a-bed poetry", spaniels eat the first drafts of masterpieces and gung-ho Ben Jonson shows he's more than happy to prove the sword is mightier than the pen. The Book of Literary Scandals shows that behind the jaunty covers and feelgood memoirs is a dingier world of personal insults, physical blows, and publishing errors. It's one where books suffer bad endings and libraries impose bizarre sanctions. It's a story of writers behaving badly since Sophocles clashed quills with Euripedes, defacing books, abandoning spouses, and regretting choosing Dylan Thomas to be the Best Man at their wedding. Elsewhere it looks at hot take reviews, sniffy dedications, publishers' rejection letters, literary friendships gone sour and why you should never lick a book with a green cover.

In a tranquil Kentish village, Dr Sandys and his wife are preparing for Christmas with their guest, Liane 'Lee' Crauford. Festivities start badly when their party is spoiled by an enigmatic widow new to the village, and the atmosphere hits rock bottom when the pompous local nobleman and ceramic-collector Sir Henry Metcalfe unexpectedly dies. Sensing potential villains among Metcalfe's circle, Lee teams up with Detective-Inspector Hugh Gordon to discover the killer playing merry hell with her holiday in this lost vintage mystery, republished for the first time since 1952.

A meeting of lost souls in the care of a headless coachman. An obsession with eugenics descends into a cruel madness. In 1911, the British writer, feminist and literary salon hostess Violet Hunt published her groundbreaking first collection of uncanny stories, Tales of the Uneasy, exploring psychological and ghostly hauntings shot through with tragedy. Seeking to promote Hunt's achievements as a writer often obscured by the famous authors of her social set literary historian Melissa Edmundson presents a new edition of her eeriest work, including material from Hunt's 1923 volume More Tales of the Uneasy.

Impossible crime stories have delighted readers since the invention of detective fiction as puzzle-lovers sought more cerebral entertainment. Following on from Miraculous Mysteries, CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards brings together a whole new casebook of mystifying locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Featuring more great stories by John Dickson Carr, Julian Symons and Margery Allingham alongside newly rediscovered writers, this selection of stories will bring you more insight into one of the most celebrated and dazzling sub-genres of detective fiction.

'Come to-night', I heard the old man say, 'come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead'. Join Weird Walk for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts of woodland. Featuring disorientating classics from John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood alongside modern, thrilling (and sometimes violent) warnings to the intrepid from Lisa Tuttle and Dorothy K. Haynes, The Wayfarer's Weird leads you towards fae dangers, down lost tracks in time and deep into the liminal spaces of Britain and beyond.

Rose has news for Celia she is due to have a baby by Celia's husband, Humphrey. Soon after, the seeds of scandal bear a criminal fruit when a body is discovered in Little Venice along with Rose's handbag. Celia drafts in an old flame, Will, to root out the truth from suspicions of murder and blackmail, as the evidence starts to converge on the patrons and strange goings-on of the seedy Chelsea club, 'The Odd Flamingo'. First published in 1954, this was one of two gritty and atmospheric crime novels written by the accomplished children's author Nina Bawden.

The discovery of a beautiful Stradivarius violin in a hidden cupboard at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, appears to be a stroke of good fortune for music student John Maltravers. But there is something sinister in the violin's history something corrupt which threatens to re-emerge as the bewitched Maltravers plays and replays a devilish tune he is powerless to resist. First published in 1895, The Lost Stradivarius has garnered a revered status as a true classic of strange fiction, described by the famed critic E. F. Bleiler as the novel M. R. James might have written, had he written novels.

One of the greatest locked-room murder mysteries of all time, hailing from 1938, returns to baffle a new bevy of armchair detectives. James Answell, visiting his father-in-law Avery Hume in his locked study, has the misfortune to wake up from a drugged-Whisky swoon to find his host dead, skewered with an arrow. He is, of course, prime suspect. After setting up this devilish scenario, unravels an ingenious courtroom thriller, in which the razor-sharp amateur detective (and barrister) Sir Henry Merrivale stars in all of his outlandish glory - and the mystery of the 'Judas Window' is revealed.

As the storm booms out in the bay and the waves smash against the rocks, the masts of a cursed and spectral vessel are drawing near. As the mists roll over Bodmin moor, the moonlight reveals a night alive with spirits. Welcoming a fresh roster of seaside spectres, tin-mine terrors and holiday haunters, this return to the bountiful fold of Cornish horror fiction features more lost classics from Victorian periodicals alongside atmospheric tales from the great twentieth-century writers of the Cornish weird such as Mary Williams, Mary Butts and Sabine Baring-Gould.

She didn't want men to be in love with her. She wanted power and a dangerous gamble and the fun of winning and putting herself over as a sweet saviour, till at last she came to believe it herself. Lorna Blake is a woman able to create her own reality a pathological liar, narcissist conman, and devoted single mother to two daughters, Jay and Molly. When her eldest needs lifesaving treatment that they cannot afford, Lorna takes up the risky but thrilling activity of taking her young daughters to the halls of wealthy strangers to beg, with tales of husbands dead, deserted, and insane. But as her daughters grow up struggling to differentiate between fact and fiction, it ultimately becomes harder for them to cleave themselves from their mother's web of lies and justifications. Acted out in the hallways of London mansions and across several continents, The Woman in the Hall is part psychological drama, part cat-and-mouse chase, as well as a darkly comic portrait of how the figure of a single mother could wring pity from 1930s society.

Trolls have escaped from the black lava wastes of Iceland and the dense pine forests of Scandinavia to take on a new life in the collective global imagination. They may not steal goats and eat people quite so much, but they remain disruptive and dangerous, even if their limited imaginations sometimes make them comic and even quite likeable. Emerging from the earliest annals of Scandinavian mythology, trolls are contradictory creatures. They can be monstrous and large as mountains, or humble and humanoid in appearance. The accounts written in Scandinavia and Iceland in the 19th century paint trolls as creatures who kidnap, overrun farms, lurk in the dark corners of landscapes, demand human marriages, eat unsuspecting travelers, and occasionally help the people who encounter them. Carolyne Larrington collects these stories into a delightful directory of trolls, from the medieval to the modern, and encountering kindly trolls, dangerous trolls, and stupid trolls along the way. Thoroughly researched and entertainingly written, The Little Book of Trolls is essential reading for the fantasy fan and a perfect introduction to the charmingly charmless world of trolls.

Girls Together magazine agony-aunt 'Mrs Friendly-wise', aka Katinka Jones, finds herself at a loose end in Swansea, and decides to pay a surprise visit to one of the magazine's regular correspondents, 'Amista'. But reaching the address a strange house perched atop a mountain which matches all of the descriptions in the letters nobody has even heard of 'Amista'. As Katinka begins to fall for the dashing master of the house, Carleon, more weird mysteries emerge and the plucky Detective Inspector Chucky joins the search for the truth in this self-consciously lurid mystery-melodrama; a rollicking cavalcade of Brand's signature twists and turns.

"...a little on one side of me, I spied something that moved along upon the verge with a sliding writhing motion, seeming like the extremity of a sort of trunk; like the body of a huge serpent... Drawn by horror's fearful traction, I moved to the verge of the parapet and looked down..."Somewhere around the early eighteenth century, young Will Harvell joins a sea voyage in search of a mariner's missing son which gradually finds itself drawn towards an ancient and indescribable terror of the ocean in E. H. Visiak's classic novel, which returns to print featuring a new introduction by horror expert Aaron Worth. Combining elements of Conradian sea adventure with Atlantean mythology and a uniquely unsettling brand of metaphysical, sublime horror-all delivered in Visiak's high literary style- Medusa remains a distinctive, influential and still exciting work in the history of early twentieth-century weird writing.