Abandoned Bookshop imprint: 24 books

A black comedy with a plot that convolutes like an eel on speed Frank Fisher, a marketing man for a tropical fruit company, walks out to post a letter one day and promptly disappears. He has fallen into the hands of eccentric underworld boss, Conrad Staggers. Reluctantly, he agrees to become an accomplice...

A haunting, unforgettable novel from one of Britain’s finest writers Antony Dobson has lived through a lot in his short twenty-six years. Desperate, loveable and utterly confused, he gets a kick out of taking risks, gets a thrill from taking himself right to the edge and, so far at least, back again....

A bittersweet suburban comedy When her husband drives to work in the city each morning, Holly Walker feels trapped in their house in the sleepy suburb of Meadow Bank. She is overweight, underappreciated and lonely. But when she starts slimming down, things begin to change alarmingly. Her husband...

An uncompromising tale of obsession and the darker side of love First published in 1945, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart is considered a classic of autobiographical fiction. Set in America, it tells of the narrator’s obsessive affair with a married man and is based...

A bawdy boarding house comedy. Skipper shares his parents’ boarding house with their lodgers, lovely Janet the bijou beauty and Senior Franklin, the volcanic literary genius. Life is sweet until one night the lugubrious Mr Marvel seeks to shelter with them. Who is the mysterious fugitive...

In hopes of emulating his hero Thoreau’s Walden , a young man documents his life as he sets out from the family home to become a writer. In the Italian North End of Boston, where family, religion and food are of equal importance, he gets an apartment and a job working in a small grocery store....

Ribelle Soderini, Reb to his family and friends, works for his father’s construction company in North Boston. The Soderinis are famous for the quality of their work. They build fine houses. Reb toils hard all day and enjoys hearty food, a good drink and, if he can find it, the company of...

Full of dark comic invention, Vinegar Soup is a fantasy with a flavour all its own… an epic romance of true love, travel, and food Gilbert Firestone, fat and fifty, works in the kitchen of the Hercules Cafe and dreams of travel and adventure. When his wife drowns in a pan of soup, he abandons the...

Phoenix Nights meets American Psycho Call him Elvis. The premier Elvis impersonator in the whole of the Cambridgeshire region. He’s overweight and bald and old. He is partial to cocaine, sells skunk to local teenagers and masturbates six or seven times a day. And he hates Elvis Presley. Things...

The short story collection the 21st century truly deserves They say it’s impossible to feel two extreme emotions at the same time. In the world of Erotic Nightmares, however, anything is possible. In ‘Pretty Boy Tigh’, a presenter on a pre-school kids’ TV channel finds himself an unlikely...