The Ghost Who Bled

A simple act of gallantry in the Malaysian jungle spawns a lifelong feud in the Home Counties... 

A fading actor with a terminal illness devises a meticulous plan to leave the stage in style... 

A pregnant composer contemplates motherhood at the end of civilisation... 

Spanning centuries and continents, the stories in this collection amount to a tour de force of literary worldbuilding. From deeply insecure time travellers to medieval mystics and futuristic body modification cults, Norminton’s characters find themselves torn between conflicting impulses – temptation and fortitude, hubris and shame, longing and regret. By turns sad, strange and darkly comic, The Ghost Who Bled reveals a master storyteller of incredible range.


"Good fiction encourages us to look at the world from another’s perspective, and in his new short story collection, Norminton explores this idea in extremis ... Norminton’s host of vivid characters and minutely realised situations transfix; we can’t help but share the “bitter-almond taste of fear” of the various snares of these lives.” - The Guardian


"This is a sublime collection of short stories by a writer whose breath-taking flexibility of style gives life to an array of different voices... Unfailingly beautiful, deceptively simple and lyrically powerful" - The Irish Times


"What a broad range of subjects and styles these short stories offer." - Times Literary Supplement



"Expansive and imaginative, a collection of short stories that tug at the veil of mortality." - Disclaimer Magazine


"There is a yesteryear quality to much of Gregory Norminton’s writing, at least in these stories, several of which look backward in style to classics of the genre." - Asian Review of Books



"The Ghost Who Bled is an at once classical and contemporary; a collection of stories that are multi-layered, subtle and complete – each one a bottled miniature. This is very fine literally fiction – relevant, not archaic or esoteric, and sometimes breath-taking for its novel-like range and ambition." - Bookmunch