Jetstone
Fiction
Books from a Parallel World
J D Clockman
- 100 pp. ISBN 9781910858172
- Date of publication: 1 April 2024
- Full colour, large format (A4)
- Price: £14.99
J. D. Clockman travels back in time to ancient Greece, destroys the Odyssey of Homer, and puts his own inferior product in its place. The reader is then taken on a mind-blowing full-colour tour of the momentous consequences for the history of western literature.
“We should be grateful for the average literature we have. Clockman shows how much worse it could have been. My only worry is, has he or she or it brought these alien books back to our timestream with him or her or it? If so, how to prevent the likely infection?”Ian McMean, Mediocrity Monthly
“In the alternative world Clockman has visited or brought into being, T. S. Eliot does not exist, but there seem to be six shades of him floating about, named variously Litotes and T. O. Ilets and O. T. Tiles (all poets), the critic Leo Tist, Lost Tie (the cover designer) and (most shockingly) the clergyman Reverend Oletits. It’s a bit like finding a New Testament with a variety of protagonists called Chris Jusset, Sir Such Jest, Chess Jurist and E. J. Shitcruss. There is a hot fire waiting down below for the author of such an atrocity.”The Archbishop of Canterbury, Heresy Hearsay
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The Odium Trilogy
J D Clockman
- 487 pp. ISBN 9781910858189
- Date of publication: 21 January 2021
The Odium Trilogy charts a complete academic year in the misfortune, decline and fall of a dysfunctional provincial English university. An American Professor arrives at the beginning of term one to take up a research post, but he is not what he seems. He has been hired by the University’s ruthless Vice Chancellor to sort out the many problems he has with his enemies among the staff, but we come to learn that he has a mission of his own. His unorthodox methods cause the University to spin entirely out of control, leading to an explosive climax that will haunt it for the rest of the year. Seven deadly plot twists follow, involving blackmail, homophobia, misogyny, violence, ignorance, corruption and deceit. Amidst a welter of comic characters are Nigel Asterisk, the weasel-like Registrar; Avril Poon, the opportunistic Union president; James Redman, her morally upstanding deputy; Robert McNamara, a disillusioned specialist in Politics; Drusilla Frost, the overripe head of PR; not to speak of a femme fatale postgraduate student, a Professor of Arabic poetry who always wears a white suit, a Ukrainian lecturer with madcap broken English, an educationist who gives a lecture which causes an international diplomatic incident, a Welsh malcontent, and one or two notorious leaders of the western world. Clockman’s hilarious triple-decker epic encapsulates all the features of the twenty-first century academy: sexual intrigue, thirst for revenge, viciousness, erudite stupidity, hypocrisy, selfishness, egomania, greed and iniquity.
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Young Frieda
John Worthen
- 201 pp. ISBN 9781910858158
- Date of publication: 20 August 2019
John Worthen’s mordantly humorous novel is grounded in reality: it is wholly fictional, but deeply rooted in the lives of real people. All accounts of the life of Frieda von Richthofen Weekley Lawrence Ravagli – best known as the wife of the writer D. H. Lawrence, and one of the models for his Lady Chatterley novel ‒ are hopelessly flawed by the impossibility of understanding her first marriage, to Professor Ernest Weekley. Readers of this novel will discover what Weekley was like as he grew up, how much he loved Frieda, how she felt about him, how she managed to carry on her marriage for thirteen years, how and why she turned to D. H. Lawrence, how she lost her three children to Weekley: and, incidentally, how much Weekley hated Lawrence. These are all here stylishly accounted for by Worthen’s back-to-back, fictional, first-person narratives, which take the reader deep inside Weekley’s point of view, and comprehensively inside Frieda’s: into his rage and bafflement and into her unrepressed anger. At least one tragic history results, and one passionate love story: but whose is which?
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Jungle Without Water and Other Stories
Sreedhevi Iyer
- 155 pp. ISBN 9781910858103
- Date of publication: 18 April 2017
Jungle Without Water and Other Stories is a collection that crosses borders and boundaries. People in these stories inhabit different stages of movement – those who have emigrated, those who want to, and those who regret it. The stories also depict our human prejudices around how we move from place to place and culture to culture. In “The Lovely Village” citizens of an unnamed settlement build a strong wall to keep newcomers out. In “Circular Feed”, refugees at a detention centre protest by standing on the roof of their living quarters. Alienation works across cultures, across boundaries of inequality. In “Green Grass” an inter-racial couple have a fight during their honeymoon in the husband’s homeland, while in the title story, two migrant boys look for the right place to pray on foreign soil. Altogether, the collection touches on how we view and understand race, colour, love, and what happens to us when we shift our selves in different environments.
“Sreedhevi Iyer deftly maps the human shifts of our time in a way few writers can, with an ear for the prejudices, accents and hopes we carry with us. This is clever, compelling twenty-first century writing, and we need more of it.”NICK EARLS
“Iyer is a wonderful storyteller, and this debut collection shows an incredible knack for locating and revealing fractures, faultlines and tensions – cultural, familial and historical – in any given moment.”BENJAMIN LAW
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Dead Iraqis: Selected Short Stories of Ellis Sharp
Ellis Sharp
- 326 pp. ISBN 9781905510092
- Date of publication: 1 August 2009
“In a society like ours there are bound to be disagreements about this and that. It is only natural. But although we may disagree on many things, I think we can all agree on one thing. The nice thing about dead Iraqis is they don’t smell.”
Dead Iraqis brings together the best short fiction of one of Britain’s leading underground writers. Written against the grain of commercial literary fiction, these stories from the era of neo-liberalism are often darkly comic in thrust, with a strong historical or political dimension. Emily Brontë runs off to Nicaragua and starts a new life as a guerrilla. Stalin fakes his death and becomes a Conservative MP. Karl Marx is discovered alive and well and living on the Isle of Wight. Using a range of techniques from collage to surreal satire, Sharp savages the values and delusions of the age, mocking everything from crop circles to political biography and imperialism. But Sharp is also a writer acutely conscious of literary tradition. Informed by influences as various as Swift, Gogol, Proust and Joyce, these fictions engage with language and the nature of narrative as they explore history, story-telling, memory, philosophy and the monstrous temper of an age steeped in blood.
“Sharp targets the deadly absurdities and frustrations of our civilisation.”
Ken MacLeod
“Ellis Sharp writes fiction unlike any other writer I have encountered to date ... his books are jam-packed with wondrous things.”Lee Rourke
“Ferociously brilliant.”
Iain Banks
“Ellis Sharp is an outstanding rebuke to all those who think political fiction means drab and po-faced fiction. Who says it can't be surreal, enraged and utterly invigorating?”China Miéville
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Quin Again and other stories
Ellis Sharp
- 166 pp. ISBN 9781910858004
- Date of publication: 30 April 2017
In this collection, cult writer Ellis Sharp reinvents the possibilities of fiction. Paying homage to the 1960s experimental novelist Ann Quin, these stories take the reader on a rollercoaster ride through a dark, absurd world where the fabric of reality is twisted into strange new shapes in which anything is possible – from an encounter with Franz Kafka’s second fiancée and a journey into a demon-populated hell to the disturbing climaxes of a paranormal communication and an all-night party. Shadowed by themes of death, passing time and lost love, this book confirms Sharp’s reputation as one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic and innovative writers.
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Lamees Najim: a novel of the information age
Ellis Sharp
- 121 pp. ISBN 9781910858059
- Date of publication: 30 April 2017
The days passed. May slid into July. Ellis absorbed each day's news. He ate and drank and went shopping. Some days he went for a walk. Birds flew by his window. Some days the sun shone, some days it rained. Almost every day Ellis went on the internet. Every day brought new information, new facts. So many facts, so much information. So many new names. So much knowledge. Lamees Najim: a novel of the information age.
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The Spirit Machine and other new short stories from Cameroon
edited by Emma Dawson
- 144 pp. ISBN 9781905510214
- Date of publication: 1 May 2017
This series focuses on the production of new World Englishes fiction. It features country anthologies of newly sourced writing in English, edited and presented with a critical and historical introduction. The first four volumes in the series concentrate on contemporary African writing. The title story of the Uganda volume, "Butterfly Dreams", was shortlisted for The Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011.
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Butterfly Dreams and other new short stories from Uganda
edited by Emma Dawson
- 137 pp. ISBN 9781905510306
- Date of publication: 2 May 2017
The title story of this volume, Beatrice Lamwaka's "Butterfly Dreams", was shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize and reprinted in the prize's 2011 anthology, "To See the Mountain". It also figured in the International Museum of Women's online exhibition, "Motherhood Aound the Globe" and the accompanying e-anthology, "Mama: Stories of Motherhood".
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Daughters of Eve and other new short stories from Nigeria
edited by Emma Dawson
- 172 pp. ISBN 9781905510276
- Date of publication: 1 May 2017
"Daughters of Eve" is full of surprise, suspense and carefully sculpted characters. This collection of eleven strories offers new departures in genre and voice through narratives of crime, love and urban living.
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Man of the House and other new short stories from Kenya
edited by Emma Dawson
- 254 pp. ISBN 9781905510320
- Date of publication: 1 May 2017
Contemporary Kenya, its challenges, its creativity and its varied human experiences are creatively explored in this volume. The expansive collection of 18 stories takes the reader through Kenya’s urban and rural scenes, its eclectic mix of peoples and identities, as well as tackling head-on the political and social issues of the country in the present day.
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Black and Whites and other new short stories from Malaysia
edited by Macdonald Daly and Emma Dawson
- 254 pp. ISBN 9781905510320
- Date of publication: 1 May 2017
Black and Whites is the fifth volume in the World Englishes Literature series. It shows that Malaysian writing in English has reached a stage of considerable advancement and independence. It explodes the official government ideology of ‘One Malaysia’ from almost every perspective conceivable, be it familial, racial, religious, cultural, economic, or generational. More than that, however, the stories herein demonstrate a linguistic self-confidence and a commitment to specifically modern Malaysian themes.
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The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong
edited by Marshall Moore and Xu Xi
- 159 pp. ISBN 9781905510436
- Date of publication: 30 April 2017
What does it mean to be a ‘Hong Kong person’? Hong Kong has never been an independent state, nor has it completely reverted to mainland Chinese control. Once a British colony, now a semi- autonomous Special Administrative Region of China, Hong Kong is something of a mystery even to itself. Although it has long had a majority Cantonese Chinese population, the presence of significant expatriate communities — Western, Indian, Filipino, and others — creates a unique cultural diversity. This is evident in Hong Kong’s literary output as well: although Cantonese is by far the majority language, English writing occupies a small but enduring niche. In this collection of short stories, eight writers explore the questions of what it means to be in, from, and of the Hong Kong of the past, the present, and the future.
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Labyrinths: The Electronic Journal of Literary Postmodernism
edited by Macdonald Daly
- 412 pp. ISBN 9781910858134
- Date of publication: 29 August 2018
Labyrinths was a short-lived British journal of literary postmodernism which appeared on the world wide web – and as quickly disappeared – in the early years of the twenty-first century. While its contents were lively and accessible, in its organisation it seemed to aim for an almost dadaistic randomness and inexplicability. In the first four of its eight issues, for example, ironic stories about world-historical figures such as Trotsky and Hitler appeared alongside a tale about the administration of lighthouses and marginalia to an unknown book. Odd poetry jostled with academic articles and reviews (some of them sober and genuine, others satirical spoofs). The individual numbers of the periodical were of wildly varying length. Its last four issues were each given over to a single author, one of them being a collection of verse, another an entire novel. The magazine also circulated in print form, published by Zoilus Press, but it had no subscribers and was not for sale. Instead, it was capriciously sent or given unbidden to individuals in a manner that ensured that no one other than the publisher possessed all the numbers. No request from any library wishing to acquire the printed journal was ever honoured. This volume reprints the entire run of Labyrinths for the first time and now makes it available in permanent form to a wider audience.
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Stained Radiance: A Fictionist’s Prelude
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon [James Leslie Mitchell]
- 272 pp. ISBN 9781910858202
- Date of Publication: 1 January 2022
Stained Radiance (first published in 1930) was the first novel by James Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon). It charts the intertwined lives of a group of men and women struggling to live in London in the wake of the First World War and the General Strike of 1926, one of them a clear forerunner of Chris Guthrie in Gibbon’s later classic trilogy, A Scots Quair. It is remarkably in advance of the many political novels which appeared in the decade to follow, not only in its twin satires on both mainstream politics and nascent British communism, but also in its forthright exploration of the sexual politics of the period. The text is here supported for the first time by a scholarly introduction, explanatory notes and commentary.
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The Thirteenth Disciple
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon [James Leslie Mitchell]
- 329 pp. ISBN 9781910858219
- Date of Publication: 21 April 2024
The Thirteenth Disciple, first published in 1931, was the second novel by James Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon). It is Mitchell’s most “Scottish” novel prior to the three volumes of A Scots Quair and the most extensive autobiographical fiction he wrote. In it we encounter a portrait of the Aberdeenshire community in which Mitchell was raised, and a memorable evocation of Glasgow during the Great War, before the protagonist’s life is caught up in the rapid social and cultural transformations of 1920s London.
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The Calends of Cairo
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon [James Leslie Mitchell]
- 253 pp.ISBN 9781910858288
- Date of publication: 13 October 2024
The Calends of Cairo, published in 1931, was the first collection of short stories by James Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon). In it, we are introduced to the narrator Colonel Saloney, a refugee from the Russian Civil War turned tour guide in Cairo. He tells us tales of the misfits, vagabonds, eccentrics, obsessives, and villains he has met in the city, which was under British colonial domination in the 1920s. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a post-war world now long gone.
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Paperback
Hardback (casebound)
The First Three Novels
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon [James Leslie Mitchell]
- 827 pp.ISBN 978-1910858349
- Date of Publication: 1 January 2025
This is an omnibus edition of the first three novels by James Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon).
Stained Radiance (1930) charts the intertwined lives of a group of men and women struggling to live in London in the wake of the First World War and the General Strike of 1926. It explores political and sexual dynamics, serving as a precursor to Gibbon's later work, A Scots Quair.
The Thirteenth Disciple (1931) offers an autobiographical glimpse into Mitchell’s Scottish roots and his experiences in Glasgow during the Great War, leading to social and cultural changes in 1920s London.
Three Go Back (1932) delves into science fiction, where modern professionals find themselves transported to the Neolithic Age, facing the implications of their presence in a pivotal moment of human history.
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Three Go Back
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon [James Leslie Mitchell]
- 236 pp.ISBN 9781910858332
- Date of Publication: 1 January 2025
Three Go Back, published in 1932, was the third novel by James Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon). Here Mitchell turns for the first time to science fiction, constructing an unusual backward-in-time-travel novel in which three modern professionals find themselves washed up on an island that should not be where it is, and in the Neolithic Age. They gradually discover that they have been transported to a vital turning-point in human history and must work out the profound implications for the future.
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Paperback
The Lost Trumpet
by LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON [JAMES LESLIE MITCHELL]
- 236 pp.ISBN 9781910858356
- Date of Publication: 25 September 2025
The Lost Trumpet, published in 1932, was the fourth novel by James Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon). Mitchell returns to the world of British-occupied Egypt in a direct sequel to his short-story cycle The Calends of Cairo (1931). An archaeological dig in the western desert aims to recover a legendary biblical artefact. Mitchell extends his retinue of foreigners exploring the Middle East of the early 1930s and discovering that what they find affects them radically in the present as much as it teaches them about the past. The text is here supported for the first time by a scholarly introduction, explanatory notes and commentary.
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Paperback
Lost Horizon
by James Hilton
- 206 pp.ISBN 9781910858318
- Date of Publication: 1 January 2025
James Hilton’s novel of 1933 was to make the name “Shangri-La” globally famous. It was a most unusual bestseller of the 1930s, winning the Hawthornden Prize in 1934. It was adapted as a Hollywood movie in 1937 which instantly transformed its author’s life.
Set in the little-known Tibet of the time, it explores an encounter between east and west when Conway, a British Foreign Service official, unexpectedly finds himself transported there. The text is here supported for the first time by a scholarly introduction and explanatory notes.
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Paperback
Gillespie
by J. MACDOUGALL HAY
- 382 pp.ISBN 9781910858455
- Date of Publication: 18 October 2025
J. MacDougall Hay's great novel of 1914, complete in a new and carefully edited text.A leech, a pirate, a predator, an anti-Christ, a public benefactor, and the fisherman's friend; such is Gillespie Strang in this remarkably powerful Scottish novel.
Gillespie is the harsh prophet of the new breed of Scottish entrepreneur, prepared to use any means to achieve his insatiable ambition amongst the nineteenth-century fishing communities of the west coast.
John MacDougall Hay (1881-1919) was born and raised in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, upon which he based the setting for Gillespie. A Church of Scotland minister, his knowledge of such communities and his sombre vision of good and evil shape this, his finest novel.
J. Macdougall Hay has set a tragic tale, which, for sheer relentlessness, it would be difficult to find a parallel.
The Times
A sprawling masterpiece which thunders with truth and authenticity.
Life and Work
It is a mighty novel, demonstrating Hay's command of sensuous descriptive narrative and symbolism.
The Scotsman
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Paperback
Barnacles and Their Dead Sons
by J. MACDOUGALL HAY
- 270 pp.ISBN 9781910858448
- Date of Publication: 17 October 2025
John MacDougall Hay published three books, all in the years of the Great War: the novels Gillespie (1914) and Barnacles (1916), and the volume of poetry Their Dead Sons (1918). He died in 1919 and seemed instantly to be consigned to oblivion, given that so little mention is made of him in the half century following. It was not until 1963 that his first work was revived, and it now seems to have taken a deservedly secure if belated place in Scottish literary history.
Hay’s two other works, however, have never been reprinted except in very poor quality print-on-demand facsimile editions. They have consequently had few readers, despite their author’s recognised qualities and historical notability. They are here reproduced with their type reset for the first time, modernised and carefully edited.
Barnacles is not a novel with the relentless intensity and brooding horror of Gillespie, but takes up more positive themes in a contrasting narrative structure, while retaining much of the energy and interest we find in the singular prose style of Gillespie. It extends the topographical reach of Hay’s Scottish world, principally to Paisley and Glasgow, and its setting is now the early twentieth, not the nineteenth, century.
While Their Dead Sons may now seem somewhat stylistically dated, and more notable for its rhetorical attempt to make sense of a violent, continent-wide trauma than as an example of accomplished verse, it hardly deserves to have been ignored in anthology after anthology of First World War Scottish poetry.
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Paperback
Complete Works
by J. MACDOUGALL HAY
- 644 pp.ISBN 9781910858462
- Date of Publication: 18 October 2025
This is an omnibus edition of the three books published by J. MacDougall Hay between 1914 and 1918, before his untimely death in 1919 at the age of only thirty-eight: the novels Gillespie (1914) and Barnacles (1916), and the volume of poetry Their Dead Sons (1918).