Christopher Burns

The definitive showcase of the year’s finest British short stories ‘Bravo to Salt’s beacon of delight and intrigue – its annual collection of the UK’s best short stories, from established and emerging voices.’ —Duncan Minshull Now relaunched for a new era, Best British Short Stories returns with a bold new look and a renewed commitment to celebrating the art of the short story. As we enter our fifteenth volume, this much-loved annual collection continues to be the go-to anthology for readers seeking the most exciting and diverse voices in contemporary British fiction. Assembled by series editor Nicholas Royle, Best British Short Stories 2025 presents a stellar selection of stories first published in 2024, drawn from magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks, and online. Whether you’re a devoted follower or discovering the series for the first time, this new edition reaffirms our mission to champion storytelling in all its forms. ‘If the latest iteration of Salt’s Best British Short Stories collection is anything to go by then the genre remains in safe hands.’ —Lawrence Foley, TLS Featuring stories by: David Bevan, Rose Biggin, Christopher Burns, Ian Critchley, Pippa Goldschmidt, Linden Hibbert, Hannah Hoare, Catrin Kean, Roger Luckhurst, Baret Magarian, Wyl Menmuir, Alison Moore, Okechukwu Nzelu, Simon Okotie, Imogen Reid, C. D. Rose, Iain Sinclair, Elizabeth Stott, Mark Valentine, and Naomi Wood.

For the second time in human history, we are on the verge of broad new breakthroughs in health, productivity, and personal freedom. And many-to-many networks are the reason. In business, government, and war, information is no longer the privilege of a powerful few. Now everyone knows what anyone knows, and we are applying that diversity of experience and perspective to expand the frontiers of our lives. We are starting to think together. The age of hierarchical organizations has ended. Social media networks, online forums, and guerilla broadcasting are connecting us in communities with fewer bureaucratic layers. In swarms, walkouts, strikes, and insurrections, people are sharing experience directly in real time, marching together into the public square, and demanding a greater voice in the new democracy. Networks Rising is the colorful story of unsung technology wizards waving us on, of philosophers struggling to free us from the dictates of church and state, and of sociologists, futurists, and even science fiction writers offering dozens of new schemes for living in a more connected world.

With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such as a repository of unstable nitrate film, a desert outcrop where a daughter vanished, a winter barn in which a silent refugee works without explanation, and a Parisian suicide that echoes down far more than a century. In these stories, landscape itself can be a determinant, as essential to the narrative as the characters that walk into a draining reservoir, a Neolithic cave, or a remote Greek church. For these are driven people – haunted or determined, alert or unaware, lovers or doubters, saviours or perpetrators. Several of these stories have previously appeared in publications as diverse as Les Temps Modernes, Granta Shorts, Best British Short Stories, The Time Out Book of New York Stories and Prospect. Christopher Burns’ work has been praised by Kazuo Ishiguro, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel and others. He is the author of six novels, including The Flint Bed (shortlisted for the Whitbread award), The Condition of Ice, A Division of the Light, and an earlier collection of short stories, About The Body. He lives in Cumbria. This is a wholly distinctive, ambitious and challenging collection that can be read again and again.

For the second time in human history, we are on the verge of broad new breakthroughs in health, productivity, and personal freedom. And many-to-many networks are the reason. In business, government, and war, information is no longer the privilege of a powerful few. Now everyone knows what anyone knows, and we are applying that diversity of experience and perspective to expand the frontiers of our lives. We are starting to think together. The age of hierarchical organizations has ended. Social media networks, online forums, and guerilla broadcasting are connecting us in communities with fewer bureaucratic layers. In swarms, walkouts, strikes, and insurrections, people are sharing experience directly in real time, marching together into the public square, and demanding a greater voice in the new democracy. Networks Rising is the colorful story of unsung technology wizards waving us on, of philosophers struggling to free us from the dictates of church and state, and of sociologists, futurists, and even science fiction writers offering dozens of new schemes for living in a more connected world. At a time when so many of our institutions seem deeply challenged, we are actually poised at the beginning of what might be humanity's greatest leap forward in 25,000 years.

It begins on a quiet city street. A woman is robbed, the crime witnessed by a man holding a camera. In the aftermath, victim and voyeur meet. It ends six months later, by which point both their lives - and the way they choose to live them - have changed irrevocably. This is the story of what happened in-between.

This spellbinding thriller offers a different explanation as to what has happened to the natives in Africa. What program, if any, has eradicated the natives? Will the white man succeed at taking over? Have they already killed the native population of the future? When will the fighting end? When will people be able to live in peace? Will it take Death on the Zambezi to stop the bloodshed, once and for all? Reading the book will answer some questions and raise some others. Enjoy the twist of this African tale!