Just After Sunset - Tapa dura

He has become a fascinating paradoxical figure, still seen as ultra-commercial but, in fact, increasingly highbrow and self-conscious * Sunday Times on DUMA KEY * Thrilling, genuinely terrifying, beautifully textured and full of wonderful invention * Daily Mail on LISEY'S STORY * The true narrative artist is a rare creature. Storytelling - the ability to make the listener or the reader need to know, demand to know, what happens next - is a gift...Stephen King, like Charles Dickens before him, has this gift in spades. * The Times on CELL *

What would you do if your everyday world were turned upside down in an instant? Here are twelve riveting stories about relationships with unexpected twists. Be very careful what you wish for. Read about the acts of kindness from strangers: 'workmen' who intervene in the obsessive exercise regime of a middle aged artist in Stationary Bike; the unexpected visitor, a blind girl, whose kiss saves a dying man; a mute hitchhiker who helps a driver get over his wife's affair. There are tales of obsession and fights for power: The Gingerbread Girl runs and runs to ease her pain; two neighbours contesting for a piece of land get into A Very Tight Place and a man who witnesses an act of domestic violence in a Rest Stop needs to step into his identity as a crime writer if he's to intervene. Then there are the unexpected outside events which turn people's worlds upside down or the right way up: a young couple, David and Willa who are derailed on a train find themselves seeking the bright lights in a nearby town -- and playing the jukebox, for eternity; an older couple want to punctuate the banal humdrum with something unusual -- until it happens.