The dazzling first short story collection from the acclaimed, best-selling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The tales in The Pier Falls, Mark Haddon's lyrical and uncompromising short story collection, take many forms—Victorian adventure story, science fiction, morality tale, contemporary realism—but all of them showcase his immense gifts of invention and penetrating insight. In these pages, a boy's life is marked by the afternoon he encounters a semiautomatic pistol belonging to his friend's older brother; a Greek princess is abandoned on an island by her abductor; a group of adventurers travel deep into the Amazonian jungle but discover the gravest danger lurking among their own number; and a woman wonders whether she has chosen to travel to Mars only to escape the entanglement of human relationships back here on Earth. Drawing inventively from history, myth, fairy tales, and, above all, the deep well of empathy that made his acclaimed novels so compelling, The Pier Falls reveals a previously unseen side of the celebrated author.