We’ve all heard of H.G. Wells. The famed British author, best known for his science fiction novels and short stories. Many of which can be found in Flame Tree’s anthologies. However, have you ever thought about what would happen if you used a time machine to travel back in time to meet the man behind those well-known words?

Featuring:

‘Shaping Things to Come’ by Dominick Cancilla (01.00), narrated by Nathan Chatelier. We found this one in our collection ‘Time Travelling Short Stories’. This is a clever story that considers the literary implications of time travel.

‘The Ghost’ by Catherine Wells (18.38), narrated by Olivia. One of the shorter stories in ‘The Open Heart’, a collection of H.G. Wells’ wife’s work that was published earlier this year. A classic horror story, full of atmosphere and whimsy.

Biographies:

Dominick Cancilla is currently living in Santa Monica, California. His previous works include dozens of short stories, one book of philosophy, and one novel, Revenant Savior. He’s also a rather extreme fan of Disney parks and his most recent works – a pair of travel guides for vampires and other unusual creatures planning Disney vacations – include advice for theme-park-visiting time travelers.

Catherine Wells (1872–1927), born Amy Catherine Robbins, worked as a teacher and studied at Tutorial College, Holborn where she met and later married H.G. Wells. She is regarded as a great supporter of her husband’s literary outpourings, while she was in fact herself a serious writer, quietly creating her own stories and poems, long-neglected until now.

Nathan Chatelier is a British voiceover artist with almost fifty audiobooks recorded alongside thousands of other projects, from video games to the Mean Girls West End trailer. Check out his demos.

This episode was hosted by Bea.

Our previous episode on Catherine Wells: https://flametr.com/4eqaOT7

‘Shaping Things to Come’ is ©2017 Dominick Cancilla and appeared in Time Travel Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2017).

‘The Ghost’ by Catherine Wells was first published in The Book of Catherine Wells in 1928 but more recently appeared in The Open Heart (Flame Tree Publishing, 2025).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

In today’s episode, which is a couple of days ahead of the Buck Moon, we are presenting you with two moon-tales. Stories, where the night dances with ancient power as the moon watches.

Featuring:

‘Shattered Moon, Hungry Sea’ by Elou Carroll (02:13), narrated by Olivia. A story where a child’s curiosity unleashes oceanic fury, proving that some jewellery should never be touched, and some secrets should stay sewn into the sky. Borrowed from Flame Tree’s ‘Moon Falling’ collection.

‘The Moon-Slave’ by Barry Pain (10:28), narrated by Bea. A Victorian nightmare, where the moon enslaves a young girl to its spell. What begins as artistic expression becomes supernatural bondage, proving that some performances are more binding than any marriage contract.

Biographies:

Elou Carroll is a graphic designer and freelance photographer who writes. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Deadlands, Baffling Magazine, If There’s Anyone Left (Volume 3), In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror (Tenebrous Press), Spirit Machine (Air and Nothingness Press), Ghostlore (Alternative Stories Podcast) and others. When she’s not whispering with ghosts, she can be found editing Crow & Cross Keys, publishing all things dark and lovely, and spending far too much time on X (Twitter) (@keychild). She keeps a catalogue of her weird little word creatures on eloucarroll.com.

Barry Pain (1864–1928) was renowned first and foremost as a comic writer. Like his friend and fellow- humourist Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927), however, he had a longstanding interest in the supernatural and the gothic. His mad-scientist shocker The Octave of Claudius (1897) was to become a pioneering Hollywood Horror movie, in the form of A Blind Bargain, with Lon Chaney and Raymond McKee, in 1922.

This episode was hosted by Shilpa Varma. To find out more about our writer-in-residence and her role at Flame Tree, click here.

‘Shattered Moon, Hungry Sea’ is © 2020 Elou Carroll and was originally published in Apparition Lit in 2020 and appeared in Moon Falling (Flame Tree Publishing, 2024).

‘The Moon-Slave’ by Barry Pain was first published in Stories in the Dark in 1901 and more recently appeared in Weird Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2022).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

Today’s episode carries us East through two short stories. These stories are united by a powerful motif - water as memory. In both, water surmounts to more, it comes to represent the enduring presence of the natural world. Offset by human mortality and the quickening of time associated with growing up.

Featuring:

‘Waiting for Karaga’ by Amal Singh (00:55), narrated by Shilpa Varma. A touching short story, borrowed from our ‘Shadows on the Water’ collection, that narrates the relationship between a lake and a young girl.

‘The Fisher-boy Urashima’ by Basil Hall Chamberlain (20:18), narrated by Amanda Benzecry. Selected from our ‘Hidden Realms’ short story collection, this pick is a Japanese Fairy Tale that is in essence an exploration of morality.

Biographies:

Amal Singh is an author from Mumbai, India. His short fiction has been longlisted for the BSFA award, and has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous venues such as Clarkesworld, F&SF, Apex, Asimov’s, among others. His debut novel, The Garden of Delights, was published by Flame Tree Press in 2024.

Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) was working in a bank in London when he dropped out and decided it was time to see the world. His first voyage took him to Japan, he settled there, first as an adviser to the government, then subsequently as literary scholar and translator.

Learn more about Shilpa Varma and her role at Flame Tree here.

Amanda Benzecry (voice actor) regularly narrates books for Audible, is on the panel for the RNIB and is a frequent contributor (both as a narrator and a writer) to TNF Soundings, providing audio material for the visually impaired.

This episode is hosted by Bea.

Our Feedback Form: https://flametr.com/44poBFK

‘Waiting for Karaga’ is ©2018 Amal Singh and was originally published in Truancy Magazine in 2018 and appeared in Shadows on the Water (Flame Tree Publishing, 2024).

‘The Fisher-boy Urashima’ by Basil Hall Chamberlain was first published as a chapbook by Kobunsha in 1886 and more recently appeared in Hidden Realms (Flame Tree Publishing, 2023).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

Our second monthly Special invites our listeners into the world of publishing, with a particular focus on the Middle East.

Recorded at London Book Fair 2025, Olivia speaks to Trevor Naylor - a writer and publisher who has over 40 years of experience in the book industry. Though his career has taken him to over 90 countries, he spent decades based in Cairo, Egypt. We catch up with him as he’s working on his latest project, a book about Egyptian Gods and mythology.

This conversation is full of fascinating insights into the Middle Eastern publishing landscape, its stories and its enduring influence.

A big thank you to our guest Trevor Naylor for taking the time to chat with us!

Trevor Naylor was born in Hull and now lives in West Yorkshire where he works as a non-fiction writer, specialising in books about Ancient Egypt. He also runs his company, named Parkway, selling books across the Middle East region. Trevor has worked in all areas of publishing and bookselling over more than 40 years. He was Sales and Marketing Director of the leading Arts publisher, Thames and Hudson. He held the same position at the American University in Cairo Press in Egypt. He has managed and worked in bookshops, owned his own independent bookshop in the UK, and travelled extensively representing publishers and selling books to over 90 countries worldwide. He is also currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing with the University of Hull.

If Trevor’s story got you curious about Ancient Egyptian myths and legends, our books ‘Egyptian Myths & Legends’, ‘Egyptian Myths & Tales’ and ‘Egyptian Ancient Origins’ , are available to shop on our website.

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

This week’s episode brings us two strange stories from the sea. The sea offers the perfect setting for short stories: it’s dramatic, vast and by extension mysterious. We only know a fraction of what actually lives in its depths. No wonder then, that it captured the imagination of the authors featured in this episode.

Featuring:

‘Over the Side’ by W.W. Jacobs (00.46), narrated by Olivia. This story was first published in 1905 and describes the eerie, supernatural experience of a sailor who falls overboard. It can be found in our Pirates & Ghosts Short Stories collection.

& ‘A Poison of Bodies Beneath the Water’ by Spencer Orey (17.10), narrated by Nathan Chatelier. Published within our Lost Atlantis Short Stories collection, this narrative imagines a closed off society of mermaids who will stop at nothing to maintain the purity of their species.

Biographies:

William Wymark (‘W.W.’) Jacobs (1863–1943) was largely known for his deeply humorous and horrifying works. His first volume of stories, Many Cargoes and ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, are the works for which he is probably most famous.

Spencer Orey is a graduate of the 2021 Odyssey Writing Workshop and a finalist for the Writers of the Future Contest. His short fiction appears in Tales from Fiddler’s Green. He has a PhD in cultural anthropology, with academic interests in magic, mobility, and media dreams that he likes to weave into speculative stories. He grew up in dry New Mexico and dry California and is happy to live in rainy Denmark with his wife and kids. Find him online at spencerorey.com or on X @spencerorey.

Nathan Chatelier is a British voiceover artist with almost fifty audiobooks recorded alongside thousands of other projects, from video games to the Mean Girls West End trailer. Check out his demos here.

This episode is hosted by Bea.

‘Over the Side’ was first published in 1897, in Today and appears in Pirates & Ghosts Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2017).

‘A Poison of Bodies Beneath the Water’ is © 2023 Spencer Orey and appears in Lost Atlantis Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2023).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

This week, we're slipping into something magical - two stories bound by a common thread: enchanted dresses. One bringing life, the other death. Together, you could say they weave a pattern of love, loss, and transformation.

Featuring:

‘The Wedding Dress’ by Cheryl S. Ntumy (00.51), narrated by the author herself, has been selected from her collection Black Friday - a stunning anthology of speculative stories from Ghana, Botswana and South Africa. This particular tale imagines a wedding dress into a symbol of grief, remembrance and ultimately, joy.

& ‘The Crimson Weaver’ by R. Murray Gilchrist (13.50), narrated by Bea. A somewhat darker story that appropriately appears in our Weird Horror anthology. Set in a surreal and fantastical realm, two men are seduced by a siren-like figure and spun to thread to reinforce the weave of the siren’s red gown.

Biographies:

Cheryl S. Ntumy is a Ghanaian writer of speculative fiction and has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine, Apex Magazine and World Literature Today. She's also been shortlisted for the Nommo Award for African speculative fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship.

R. Murray Gilchrist made his name as the author of over twenty novels – many of them set in the nearby Peak District, where he made his home. But his short stories commanded considerable respect, and a great many of those dealt in horror and the macabre.

This episode is hosted by Olivia.

‘The Wedding Dress’ is © 2025 Cheryl S. Ntumy and appeared in Black Friday (Flame Tree Publishing, 2025).

‘The Crimson Weaver’ was first published in 1895, in The Yellow Book Quarterly, Vol, VI and appears in Weird Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2022).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

On this week’s episode of the Flame Tree Myth & Fiction Podcast, we feature two powerful short stories linked by their discussions of motherhood - but don’t be mistaken, these stories are anything but sweet.

Featuring:

‘Pegasus’ by Danai Christopoulou (00.50), narrated by Amanda Benzecry. A narrative that follows the famed pegasus, through its creation, violent birth and its resulting vow of revenge. This story can be found in Medusa, a book published last year in our Myths, Gods & Immortals series.

& ‘The Mother’s Eyes’ by Charles Dickens (11.26), narrated by Nathan Chatelier. A story that follows a man who is haunted by the eyes of a grieving mother after he indirectly causes the death of her child. Published within Charles Dickens Supernatural Short Stories.

Biographies:

Danai Christopoulou (she/they) is a queer Greek SFF author and editor currently living in Sweden. Their short fiction has been published in Fusion Fragment and others, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for a Nebula Award. Follow them on X for regular updates.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812. Dickens kept up a career in journalism as well as writing short stories and novels, with much of his work being serialised before being published as books.

Amanda Benzecry (voice actor) regularly narrates books for Audible, is on the panel for the RNIB and is a frequent contributor (both as a narrator and a writer) to TNF Soundings, providing audio material for the visually impaired.

Nathan Chatelier is a British voiceover artist with almost fifty audiobooks recorded alongside thousands of other projects, from videogames to the Mean Girls West End trailer. Check out his demos.

This episode is hosted by Bea.

‘Pegasus’ is © 2023 Danai Christopoulou and was originally published in The Icarus Writing Collective in 2023 and appeared in Medusa (Flame Tree Publishing, 2024).

‘The Mother’s Eyes’ by Charles Dickens was first published in The Old Curiosity Shop and Other Tales, Chapman & Hall in 1841 and more recently appeared in Charles Dickens Supernatural Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2020).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

The first of our monthly specials! In this week’s episode, Olivia revisits her conversation with the editors of The Open Heart & Short Stories by Catherine Wells, Patrick Parrinder and Emelyne Godfrey. Recorded at The London Book Fair, this episode is full of insights and revelations about the often overlooked authorial work of H.G. Wells’s wife.

The Open Heart is one of the latest books to come out in our Beyond & Within series. It collates Catherine Wells’s previously published work alongside her unfinished novella, ‘The Open Heart’, which has never before been published!

Thank you to our guests Patrick & Emelyne. The Open Heart is now available to order through our website.

Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and President of the H.G. Wells Society .He is the author of many books on H.G. Wells, science fiction and modern literature, and is General Editor of the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English (2011–24).

Emelyne Godfrey has a PhD from Birkbeck College. She is author of several books on the long nineteenth century including Mrs Pankhurst’s Bodyguard: On the Trail of ‘Kitty’ Marshall and the Met Police ‘Cats’ (The History Press, 2023). She writes widely on women’s history, crime, science fiction and the supernatural.

Catherine Wells (1872–1927), born Amy Catherine Robbins, worked as a teacher and studied at Tutorial College, Holborn where she met and later married H.G. Wells. She is regarded as a great supporter of her husband’s literary outpourings, while she was in fact herself a serious writer, quietly creating her own stories and poems, long-neglected until now.

A big thank you to Claire Cartwright and Carol Goodwin at Novocon for inspiring our Desert Island Books segment!

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.