The stories in this collection are vibrant, gripping and intricately worked, but they are more than simply small masterpieces of narrative art.

A book of poems that is at once personal and political. It registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama.

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled 'verbal terrorist', who began trying, in her words, to 'ruin him'. Hate-mail - much of it violently anti-Semitic - online postings and public accusations of theft and sexual misconduct, have been her weapons of choice, and, as with more conventional terrorist weapons, have proved remarkably difficult to combat. James Lasdun's account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and humour, and brilliantly...