Short stories that will make you sit bolt upright

FICTION: Bad Dreams, By Tessa Hadley, Jonathan Cape, €22.60

‘Jane Allsopp was abducted when she was 15 and nobody noticed.” This is the arresting opening of An Abduction, the first tale in a collection of short stories by the British writer Tessa Hadley.

Jane is on her summer holidays and is intensely bored, “her mind a blank with vivid little jets of dissatisfaction firing off in it”.

Barefoot and listless on the road outside her house, “something was revealed in her that ...