Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Neil Gaiman's second short fiction collection ranges from a Victorian detective story reimagining the work of Conan Doyle to a post-American Gods novella set in an ancient Scottish manor to two teenagers crashing a party and meeting girls who are something other than human. What unites the pieces is Gaiman's particular gift for finding the hinge between the familiar and the deeply strange, and his willingness to let darkness and wonder occupy the same sentence. The collection contains Hugo and Locus Award-winning work.

Gaiman narrates his own collection, which transforms the listening experience into something closer to a performance — his cadence, his pauses, his evident pleasure in his own strange creations give each piece an authority that no produced narration could replicate. At just over ten and a half hours, this is one of the rare audiobooks where the author's voice becomes inseparable from the text. Essential listening for anyone drawn to literary fantasy in the oral tradition.