'A marvel of a collection - suffused with curiosity, humanity and mystery, bold in its scope and virtuoso in its telling. Mark Haddon makes stories matter' * Kaliane Bradley * 'In sentences as precisely cut as paper sculptures, Mark Haddon fits ancient myth to the cruelties and wonders of the present' * Francis Spufford * Praise for Mark Haddon's short stories: 'The real redemption in these superbly gripping stories comes from their canny human detail, and the vivid, unsettling clarity they bring to our brief lives' Sunday Times * Sunday Times * 'He is a master of the short form' * i paper * 'Exquisite . . . The reader might assume that Haddon . . . can describe anything. Such a reader would not be disappointed' * The Times

Mark Haddon is a writer and artist. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling in 2003. It won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award. In 2012, a stage adaptation by Simon Stephens was produced by the National Theatre and went on to win 7 Olivier Awards in 2013 and the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play. In 2005 his poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, was published by Picador, and his play, Polar Bears, was produced by the Donmar Warehouse in 2010. The Pier Falls, a collection of short stories, was also published by Cape in 2016. To commemorate the centenary of the Hogarth Press he wrote and illustrated a short story that appeared alongside Virginia Woolf's first story for the press in Two Stories (Hogarth, 2017). His most recent novel, The Porpoise, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2019.