Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone.

Michael Kind is raised in the Jewish cauldron of 1920s New York, familiar with the stresses and materialism of metropolitan life. Turning to the ancient set of ethics of his Orthodox grandfather, with a modern twist, he becomes a Reform rabbi. As insecure and sexually needy as any other young male, he serves as a circuit-rider rabbi in the Ozarks, and then as a temple rabbi in the racially ugly South, in a San Francisco suburb, in a Pennsylvania college town, and, finally, in a New England community west of Boston.

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.

Meet Lady Toad, Mistress Badger, Miss Water Rat and Mrs Mole as they go about their adventures, messing around on the river, gallivanting in Lady Toad’s shiny new toy and fighting valiantly to save Toad Hall from unruly squatters. In this retelling by Dina Gregory, The Wind in the Willows becomes a story about a group of female animals to be admired for their close sisterhood and fierce independence. Featuring original music and songs by Rosabella Gregory and sound effects captured on location, put your headphones on, sit back and lose yourself in the British countryside.

1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier; Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.

On Strong Beach, an awkward teen with a terrible haircut has a reversal of fortune when he finds artefacts from the future lining a seagulls’ nest. By the Hox River in Nebraska, a window fuels both family pride and deadly revenge. In a godforsaken barn in what they suspect is Kentucky, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic and chilli peppers, creeping honeysuckle, and in the centre, growing through a cavity in the roof, a fig tree. The fig tree witnesses their hushed, happy meetings; their silent, surreptitious departures. The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish.

The Book of Speculation is Erika Swyler's gorgeous and moving debut, a wondrous novel about the power of books, family, and magic. Simon Watson lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home, a house perched on the edge of a cliff that is slowly crumbling into the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a travelling carnival and seldom calls.

This breathtaking novel travels more than a century between two love stories set in the Australian seaside town of Lighthouse Bay. In 1901, a ship sinks off the coast of Lighthouse Bay in Australia. The only survivor is Isabella Winterbourne - escaping her loveless marriage and the devastating loss of her son - who clutches a priceless gift meant for the Australian Parliament. Suddenly, this gift could be her ticket to a new life, free from the bonds of her husband and his overbearing family.

In the worlds of Steve Rasnic Tem, a father takes his son "fishing" in the deepest part of downtown, flayed rabbits visit a suburban back yard, a man is haunted by a surrealistic nightmare of crutches, a father is unable to rescue his son from a nightmare of trees, a bereaved man transforms memories of his wife into performance art, great moving cliffs of detritus randomly prowl the world, a seemingly pointless life finds final expression in bits of folded paper, a nuclear holocaust brings about a new mythology, an isolated man discovers he’s part of a terrifying community, and more.

Billy Potter is 11 years old. He never smiles. He never laughs. His copper-colored eyes stare calmly at the world. He is not quite human. He cannot love. He is searching for something - or someone. Where Billy Potter travels, death follows.

Fleeing an abusive marriage and tormented by her past, Alexandra Turner finds solace in a small coastal town on Puget Sound and a job with a local marine biologist studying orcas. After befriending a group of locals, Alex learns that she has moved to a place that has a reputation of being the "most haunted town in Washington." Such superstitions would be easy to dismiss...if Alex wasn’t already on edge. Haunted by shreds of memories of her days with her husband, Alex can’t keep from looking over her shoulder.

For Naomi Ash, growing up the daughter of a clairvoyant medium exposed her to the chicanery of a business where telling people what they want to hear is the only currency. And the sleepy hamlet of Train Line, New York, nestled against a frigid lake in the westernmost fringes of the state, was founded on, built, and is still sustained by it. Now a young woman and a practicing medium herself, Naomi still lives in the place that nourished and raised her - the place where she fell in love. Love, however, can be deadly....

When Michael Blumlein's debut collection The Brains of Rats first appeared, it marked the arrival of a major new talent, earning widespread acclaim from mainstream critics as well as genre stalwarts Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, Pat Cadigan and many others.

The Long List Anthology is designed to recognize the short works that were nominated for the 2015 Hugo Awards but did not make it into the top five short list for the final ballot. Thus, voted into the Hugo Award's long list of works - the top 15 works nominated for each category - were these nine short stories and three novelettes, now made available to a wider audience by award-winning narrators.