The stories in this remarkable collection—including "An Anxious Man," winner of the National Short Story Prize (UK)—are vibrant and gripping. James Lasdun's great gift is his unfailing psychological instinct for the vertiginous moments when the essence of a life discloses itself. With forensic skill he exposes his characters' hidden desires and fears, drawing back the folds of their familiar self-delusions, their images of themselves, their habits and routines, to reveal their interior lives with brilliant clarity.In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales in It's Beginning to Hurt chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the full range of human passions. They rise to unexpected heights of decency or stumble into comic or tragic folly. They throw themselves open to lust, longing, and paranoia—always recognizably mirrors of our own...

Love and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal form the coordinates of these two intensely dramatic stories of men and women caught between their irrational passions and the urge for control. In Feathered Glory the seemingly happy marriage of a school principal and his artist wife reveals dangerous fault-lines as an old lover reappears in the husband's life and the wife, fascinated by a charismatic wildlife rehabilitator, brings an injured swan into their home. The poignant denouement leaves every character irreversibly transformed.The past also haunts the present in Afternoon of a Faun, where an accusation of historic sexual assault plunges Marco Rosedale, an English journalist in New York, into a series of deepening crises. Set during the months leading up to Trump's election, this is at once a study of our shifting social and sexual mores, and a meditation on what makes us believe or disbelieve the stories of other people. These...

Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, longs for love, glory and freedom - yearnings that express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. The hopeless son of an ambitious mother and a kind but unlucky diplomat, Stefan lurches between his budding, covert interests - girls and Romantic poetry - to find himself embroiled in dissident politics, which oddly seems to offer both.In time, by a series of blackly comic and increasingly dangerous manoeuvres, he contrives to make his fantasy come true, finding himself not only in the country of his dreams, but also married to the woman he idolises. America seems everything he expected and meanwhile his secrets are safely locked away behind the Berlin Wall.A new life of unbounded bliss seems to have been granted to him. And then that life begins to fall apart...

In this taut psychological thriller, a couple and their houseguest find themselves caught in a deadly web of secrets, obsession, and revenge.It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun's acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun's most entertaining novel yet.

Lawrence Miller, an English expatriate in New York, tells the story of what appears to be an elaborate conspiracy to frame him for a series of brutal killings. The intricate plot entangles Miller, a teacher of Gender Studies, in the lives of a womanising colleague under investigation for sexual harassment, a lonely attorney who has developed an inexplicable passion for Miller, and a shadowy Bulgarian who adapts Kafka for the stage, is prone to acts of explosive violence, and may or may not be sleeping under Miller's office desk. As the novel spirals to its shocking conclusion, Lawrence Miller traverses, in terror, the streets of Manhattan, tracking the lines of human connection across the city and out to the decaying suburbs beyond, in wild pursuit of his persecutors.