Darkness lives within ...Cash-strapped, working for agencies and living in shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgware Road is not what it appears to be. It's not only the eerie atmosphere of the vast, neglected house, or the disturbing attitude of her new landlord, Knacker McGuire, that makes her uneasy - it's the whispers behind the fireplace, the scratching beneath floors, the footsteps in the dark, and the young women weeping in neighbouring rooms. And when Knacker's cousin Fergal arrives, the danger goes vertical. But this is merely a beginning, a gateway to horrors beyond Stephanie's worst nightmares. And in a house where no one listens to the screams, will she ever get out alive?

This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow – hopefully for the better – but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from.

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title). Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima. Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston

A spellbinding story about two girls whose friendship is so intense it not only threatens to destroy them, it changes the trajectory of history. Marie Antoine is the charismatic, spoiled daughter of a sugar baron. At 12 years old, with her blond curls and her unparalleled sense of whimsey, she's the leader of all the children in the Golden Mile, an affluent strip of 19th century Montreal. Until one day in 1873, when Sadie Arnett, dark-haired, sly, and brilliant, moves to the neighborhood. Marie and Sadie are immediately united by their passion and intensity, and they attract and repel each other in ways that light each of them on fire. Marie with her bubbly charm sees the light and sweetness of the world, whereas Sadie's obsession with darkness is all consuming. Soon their childlike games take on a thrill of danger and then become deadly. Forced to separate, they spend their teenage years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity--until a singular event unites them once more, with dizzying effects. And after Marie inherits her father's sugar empire and Sadie disappears into the city's gritty underworld, a revolution of the working class begins to foment. Each of them will have unexpected roles to play in events that upend their city--the only question is whether they will find each other once more. Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal's wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender and power, sex and desire, class and status, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can't let someone go.

Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to Gideon the Ninth, turns a galaxy inside out as one necromancer struggles to survive the wreckage of herself aboard the Emperor's haunted space station. She answered the Emperor's call. She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend. In victory, her world has turned to ash. After rocking the cosmos with her deathly debut, Tamsyn Muir continues the story of the penumbral Ninth House in Harrow the Ninth, a mind-twisting puzzle box of mystery, murder, magic, and mayhem. Nothing is as it seems in the halls of the Emperor, and the fate of the galaxy rests on one woman's shoulders. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath — but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her. Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor's Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?

This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow – hopefully for the better – but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from.

The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

At seventeen, Lenora Hope Hung her sister with a rope Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred. Stabbed her father with a knife Took her mother’s happy life It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything. “It wasn’t me,” Lenora said But she’s the only one not dead As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.

A spellbinding story about two girls whose friendship is so intense it not only threatens to destroy them, it changes the trajectory of history. Marie Antoine is the charismatic, spoiled daughter of a sugar baron. At 12 years old, with her blond curls and her unparalleled sense of whimsey, she's the leader of all the children in the Golden Mile, an affluent strip of 19th century Montreal. Until one day in 1873, when Sadie Arnett, dark-haired, sly, and brilliant, moves to the neighborhood. Marie and Sadie are immediately united by their passion and intensity, and they attract and repel each other in ways that light each of them on fire. Marie with her bubbly charm sees the light and sweetness of the world, whereas Sadie's obsession with darkness is all consuming. Soon their childlike games take on a thrill of danger and then become deadly. Forced to separate, they spend their teenage years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity--until a singular event unites them once more, with dizzying effects. And after Marie inherits her father's sugar empire and Sadie disappears into the city's gritty underworld, a revolution of the working class begins to foment. Each of them will have unexpected roles to play in events that upend their city--the only question is whether they will find each other once more. Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal's wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender and power, sex and desire, class and status, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can't let someone go.

Alien meets Midsommar in this chilling debut adult novel from award-winning author Andrew Joseph White about identity, survival, and transformation amidst an alien invasion in rural West Virginia. Festering masses of worms and flies have taken root in dark corners across Appalachia. In exchange for unwavering loyalty and fresh corpses, these hives offer a few struggling humans salvation. A fresh start. It’s an offer that none refuse. Crane is grateful. Among his hive’s followers, Crane has found a chance to transition, to never speak again, to live a life that won’t destroy him. He even met Levi: a handsome ex-Marine and brutal killer who treats him like a real man, mostly. But when Levi gets Crane pregnant—and the hive demands the child’s birth, no matter the cost—Crane’s desperation to make it stop will drive the community that saved him into a devastating spiral that can only end in blood. You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is a deeply personal horror; a visceral statement about the lives of marginalized people in a hostile world, echoing the works of Stephen Graham Jones and Eric LaRocca.