Normal Rules Don't Apply
A dazzling collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Life After Life
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
The first story collection from Kate Atkinson in twenty years, Normal Rules Don't Apply is a dazzling array of eleven interconnected tales from the bestselling author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life
In this first full collection since Not the End of the World, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; 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, a constantly changing multiverse in which nothing is quite as it seems.
‘What really binds these stories is their underlying theme, which has perhaps always been Atkinson’s true subject: the nature of storytelling itself’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Life in all of its surreal, tragic and comic glory is perfectly captured within these pages’ Red
‘Sublime’ Good Housekeeping
‘Dazzling’ Reader's Digest
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Praise for Kate Atkinson:
'Inexhaustibly ingenious' HILARY MANTEL
'Simply one of the best writers working today, anywhere in the world' GILLIAN FLYNN
'A brilliant and profoundly original writer' RACHEL CUSK
'Atkinson is a novelist of unrivalled immediacy, authority, and skill' FINANCIAL TIMES
'One of the country's most innovative, exciting and intelligent authors.' SCOTSMAN
Sunday Times bestseller, August 2023
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A world-changing darkness, a queen cursed by a witch and an immaculate conception are just some of the intertwining threads to a larger, overarching tale in Kate Atkinson’s collection of short stories, Normal Rules Don’t Apply. Set in a world just like ours, Atkinson bleeds supernatural, science fiction and magical elements into 11 everyday snapshots of life for a cast of vividly rendered characters, disrupting reality as we—and they—know it. Branching out from the core theme—the end of the world—Atkinson comfortably spreads her intuitive sense for spiking a droll turn of phrase with a sharp bite of truth across a versatile array of genre pieces, including a fairytale, a ghost story and a thriller, each of which add up to the thoroughly satisfying whole. Read once for the head-spinning entertainment factor and immediately flip back to the beginning to catch all the references, call backs and recurring roles you didn’t pick up on the first time.
