How Much the Heart Can Hold: the perfect alternative Valentine's gift: Seven Stories on Love - Couverture souple

Bernardine Evaristo is the award-winning author of seven books, including her most recent novel, Mr Loverman (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin-Random House, 2013).

Carys Bray is the author of a collection of short stories, Sweet Home, and two novels, A Song for Issy Bradley, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, and The Museum of You.

D. W. Wilson is a short story writer, novelist, Canadian citizen by birth and temperament, video game nerd, teacher, and redneck - among other things. He is currently between books, but his previous works are a short story collection, Once You Break a Knuckle, and Ballistics, a novel.

Donal Ryan was born in Tipperary in 1976; he's a novelist, short-story writer and Fellow of the University of Limerick.

Grace McCleen studied English Literature at Oxford and York Universities. She has written three critically acclaimed novels and reviews fiction for national newspapers.

Nikesh Shukla is the author of Coconut Unlimited, Meatspace and The Time Machine, the editor of the collection The Good Immigrant and a sitcom writer.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of the novel Harmless Like You, and her short work has appeared in, among other places, the Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, and NPR's Selected Shorts.

'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.'
Zelda Fitzgerald

Love is not a singular concept.

In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from Philautia, self-love, to Agape, love for humanity; and from Storge, a natural affection for family, to Mania, a frenzied, obsessive love.

This edition contains the winning short story from the SceptreLoves competition.

'Together [the stories] assert that love is more heartbreaking and transforming than the word necessarily conveys'
Observer

'All seven score an outright win in the battle to make the ethereal real.'
Country Life