-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
These unforgettable stories are by turns haunting, funny, sparkling, and scary. Byatt’s Little Black Book adds a deliciously dark note to her skill in mixing folk and fairy tales with everyday life.
The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and A Whistling Woman is at her best in this dazzling collection of five new tales.
Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their childhood fears and memories and the strange thing they saw–or thought they saw–so long ago. A distinguished male obstetrician and a young woman artist meet in a hospital, but they have very different ideas about body parts, birth, and death. A man meets the ghost of his living wife; a woman turns to stone. And an innocent member of an evening creative writing class turns out to have her own decided views on the best way to use "raw material."
These unforgettable stories are by turns haunting, funny, sparkling, and scary. Byatt’s Little Black Book adds a deliciously dark note to her skill in mixing folk and fairy tales with everyday life.
Having finished this collection of short stories it wasn't clear whether or not to recommend them at BookBrowse - but two to three weeks later they have passed one important test - despite having read quite a number of books since, these mildly sinister short stories are still playing in my mind.
If you liked The Little Black Book of Stories, try these:
by A.L. Kennedy
Published 2011
Powerful and funny, intimate and profound, the stories in What Becomes capture the spirit of our times with dark humor, poignant hopefulness, and brilliant evocation of contemporary social and spiritual malaise.
by Haruki Murakami
Published 2007
A collection of short-stories from widely acclaimed author Haruki Murakami. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for.
