Welcome to a world, where nothing is quite what it seems…

In these pages, you’ll meet, among others, a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep, a secretary who watches over the life she has just left, and a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him.

With clockwork intricacy, inventiveness and sharp social observation, Kate Atkinson conjures a feast for the imagination in a constantly changing multiverse.

Atkinson’s first short story collection in twenty years, Normal Rules Don’t Apply is a dazzling array of eleven interconnected tales.

KATE ATKINSON

Kate Atkinson is one of the world’s foremost novelists. Her most recent novel, Shrines of Gaiety, set in the aftermath of the First World War, is a Sunday Times bestseller. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her three critically lauded and prize-winning novels set around the Second World War are Life After Life, an acclaimed 2022 BBC TV series, A God in Ruins (both winners of the Costa Novel Award) and Transcription. Her bestselling literary crime novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog, became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs. Jackson Brodie later returned in the novel Big Sky. Kate Atkinson was awarded an MBE in 2011 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.