Martyn Bedford

Here, 14 authors have been invited to work with key scientists to explore, through short fiction, various aspects of sleep research: from the possibilities of ‘sleep engineering’ and ‘overnight therapies’, to future-tech ways of harnessing sleep’s problem-solving powers, to the challenges posed by our increasingly 24-hour lifestyles.

When an out-of-work actor discovers his bedsit once belonged to an obscure, suicidal painter, he turns his talents to re-creating the ultimate site-specific performance… As a teenage girl drifts from depression into a permanent state of sleep, she becomes the focus of both scientific interest and an unexpected, cult following... Against a backdrop of hooliganism and hostility, an asylum seeker writes letters home assuring his family how welcoming England is... Many of the characters in Martyn Bedford’s stories find themselves at a point of redefinition, trading in their old identity for something new. Whether it is an act of retreat or escape – fantasising about storming out of a thankless job, or just avoiding a bad-tempered husband for a few moments on Christmas day – they each understand the first step in changing a reality, is to reconstruct it.

Two go missing. One comes back.Gloria is tired of her ordinary life. She barely recognizes the free-spirited girl she used to be in the unadventurous teenager she has become. So when a mysterious boy bent on breaking the rules strolls into her classroom, Gloria is ready to fall under his spell. Uman is funny, confident and smart. He does whatever he likes and doesn't care what anyone thinks of him. The only people for him are the mad ones, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn. He is everything Gloria wishes to be. He can whisk her away from the life she loathes and show her a more daring, more exciting one, in which the only limits are the boundaries of her own boldness. But Uman in not all he seems and by the time she learns the truth about him, she is a long way from home and everyone wants to know, Where's Gloria?

How can she live with what she did?

"Flip is captivating from beginning to end, with rich characters and a fascinating mystery. . . . Highly recommended " --James Dashner, author of the Maze Runner series What does it mean to have a soul whose will to live knows no limits? One morning fourteen-year-old Alex wakes up to find himself in the wrong bedroom, in an unfamiliar house, in a different part of the country. Six months have disappeared overnight. The family at the breakfast table? Total strangers. And when he looks in the mirror, another boy's face stares back. A boy named Philip, known as Flip. Unless Alex finds out what's happened and how to get back to his own life, he'll be trapped forever inside a body that belongs to someone else. Martyn Bedford's debut novel for young adults is fearless and fast-paced, a riveting psychological thriller about a boy coming undone in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Praise for Flip A Junior Library Guild SelectionA School Library Journal Best Book of the Year "The mysteries are countless: What is a soul? Where does it go when its human host ceases to function? Bedford adeptly sweeps the existential curtain aside and tackles these heavy questions as the tension soars." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred

A fugitive turns up at a young widow's door. Finn is a draft dodger. Afraid of dying and opposed to the war, he could see no way out until a stranger slipped him a calling card for an anti-draft network. Now on the run, he has the promise of a new identity and a new life, but if he is caught, the punishment will be brutal. Then he meets Bryher. Thrown together by war, united in grief, they take a chance on one another: a chance that could make or break them.

Bringing together fiction from some of the city's most celebrated writers, The Book of Leeds traces the unique contours that fifty years of social and economic change can impress on a city. These are stories that take place at oblique angles to the larger events in the city's history, or against wider currents that have shaped the social and cultural landscape of today's Leeds: a modern city with both problems and promise.