Normal Rules Don't Apply

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 ____________ 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

KATE ATKINSON is one of the world's foremost novelists. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Life After Life, an acclaimed BBC TV series, won several prizes including the Costa Novel Award, as did A God in Ruins. Two further historical novels - Transcription and Shrines of Gaiety - were also Sunday Times bestsellers. She has published two critically acclaimed collections of short stories: Not the End of the World and Normal Rules Don't Apply. Her bestselling literary crime novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog, became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs. Jackson Brodie later returned in the novel Big Sky and the most recent, Death at the Sign of the Rook, was a number one bestseller. Kate Atkinson was awarded an MBE in 2011 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. For information about Kate's books, including her Jackson Brodie series, visit www.kateatkinson.co.uk