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Toby Litt's third book is a stylish literary thriller complete with lovingly described bullet wounds, a cycle courier dressed to kill, fashionable restaurants and even more fashionable dresses. A cynical and ironic view of contemporary London life, its plot is gripping, the characters are intriguing if not always sympathetic and the writing is elegant and precise.

A collection of stories from Toby Litt, threatening even more twists and turns, sex and violence, and glitz and glamour than in previous works. The text stars Polly Morphous, Lee Perverse and the Audioguide to the Museum-of-Inside-Your-Head, and this time - its personal.

When Agatha and Paddy decide to leave London and buy a house on the coast, they are full of hope for themselves and their growing family. Three months later, when the builders move out and they move in, things look very different. A personal tragedy threatens to destroy all they have carefully built up and only a small miracle, it seems, will save them ...

Ghost Story is a book both haunted and haunting, which asks how we can ever mourn something that hasn't lived. Emotionally resonant, beautifully crafted and ultimately redemptive, it is Toby Litt's finest, most mature novel to date.

Always hated liner notes - always hated any kinda writing about rock'n'roll - I mean, why don't ya just shut up & listen to the music? - but here I am now, trying to catch in words what I think & feel about my good friend Clap & about these fine & dandy tales he's spun - tales of life on & off the road with a band called okay - a band in which I am lead singer - & in which Clap is drummer - not the world's greatest, technically, even he'd admit to that - but solid & deep & swingin' & truthful - & I suppose that's what I want to say this here book is - truth-full - if I'd written it, it would be all about high times & honeys - & Clap has gotten down that wild stuff - but he's also told the cold truth about the things you lose along the way - & I think he's done it just about as well as it coulda been done - & believe me, I should know: I wasn't there for most of it. Stay cool, Syph x.

As editors Toby Litt and Ali Smith explain in their introduction: 'newness is quite a venerable category. There's not much that's new about it. In the 1930s, when a magazine called New Writing was first published, it had to compete with New Signatures, New Country, New Verse, the Statesman and Nation and New Theatre, and what with the New Woman of the 1890s and new everything else, even then, new wasn't the new new... If we've achieved diversity, it's because our submissions were themselves diverse; and the final selection is representative of the proportion of short stories to novel extracts, poems and essays that were submitted. Originality is only proven over time, paradoxically. We are confident that some of the names here you've never heard before will become very familiar. They may even disgrace themselves by winning prizes, becoming established, etc. But they'll be the kinds of writer, like the known names published here, for whom everything they write is a renewal - of language, of place, of the senses and of the contemporary.'