So this year’s challenge is a bit different and as promised each month we’ll give you a list of suggested books for each category. For February I asked the Cwts Discussion Group to recommend their favourite books of short stories, I was inundated, these are just a few of the many:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A collection of twelve stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that feature his most famous detective – Sherlock Holmes. Join Sherlock and his assistant Dr. Watson, as they investigate everything from blackmailed kings to bank robberies.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes US
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes UK
Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
As familiar to many Hogwarts students as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are to Muggle children, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a collection of popular stories written for young wizards and witches.


The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow.
The Tsar of Love and Techno US
The Tsar of Love and Techno UK
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
From the Orange Prize-winning author of ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ come twelve dazzling stories that turn a penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West.


Reader I Married Him compiled by Tracy Chevalier
The twenty-one stories in Reader, I Married Him – one of the most celebrated lines in fiction – are inspired by Jane Eyre and shaped by its perennially fascinating themes of love, compromise and self-determination.
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
Adam Johnson takes you into the minds of characters you never thought you would meet – a former Stasi prison warden in denial of his past, a refugee from North Korea unsettled by his new freedom, a UPS driver in hurricane-torn Louisiana looking for the mother of his son.


South Sea Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson
In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of `The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of `The Bottle Imp and `The Isle of Voices, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide
Dubliners by James Joyce
A collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging.


Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
An elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat. A stray cat fights and refights a terrible nightly battle to protect his unwary adoptive family from unimaginable evil. These tales and much more await in this extraordinary book.
Dear Life by Alice Munro
Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being.


The Complete Short Stories by Roald Dahl
There are lots of books of Roald Dahl’s short stories available, this is just one of the many you could choose from.
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro explores the ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the ‘hush-hush floor’ of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to café musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning.

Obviously these are just a few suggestions, we also have a list of For Reading Addicts 7 Short Story Collections suggested by our readers or if you fancy some P.G. Wodehouse
Pick a collection of Short Stories using our lists or pick one off your TBR pile but don’t forget to let us know what you’re reading over on Cwts Club Discussion Group