Showing results by narrator "Beth Frieden" in All Categories

What makes everyday spaces work, how do they shape us, and what do they say about us? The spaces we live in - whether public areas, housing, offices, hospitals or cities - mediate community, creativity and our very identity, making us who we are. Using insights from environmental psychology, design, and architecture, The Shaping of Us reveals the often imperceptible ways in which our surroundings influence our behaviour.

Strange stories about strange things for strange people. Tales of possession and obsession. Of destruction and restoration. Of the demons we hold inside us, and those we leave behind in others. An odd apocalypse freezes a supermarket on Mother’s Day, a vanished village holds an ancient curse, an abandoned ice cream van tears a street apart. Rival rainbow setters, the woman who sowed a crop of elephants in her garden, and what happens if you keep on turning the clocks back. Perhaps you had a demon then lost it. Do you miss it?

A man carries his girlfriend in the left-hand breast pocket of his shirt. During World War II, a young soldier searches the houses and barns of the families with whom he grew up. An astronaut wonders whether she can adapt to life back on Earth. In her second collection of short fiction, 100neHundred, Laura Besley explores a kaleidoscope of emotions through 100 stories of exactly 100 words.

Set mostly in the north of the UK, in a near future. Women march together in protest at a government reneging on climate promises. Two glorified paper pushers in Spain help British ex-pats escape a heatwave that will soon lay waste to most of southern Europe. A twitter storm erupts in the panic of a real tempest. In the northeast, a beloved allotment sinks below the waterline. Sea levels rise, toxic rain falls and the earth poisons the food that grows in it. The elite, and winners of the life lottery, are evacuated to giant towers.