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

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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

We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; and a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him. Witty and wise, with subtle connections between the stories, NORMAL RULES DON'T APPLY is a startling, and funny feast for the imagination.