Early Novels and Short Fiction is the first of three volumes covering Peter Cowlam's adventures into fiction, dating from the mid-1970s and into the twenty-first century. Early Novels and Short Fiction covers the period from 1974 to 1998 (approximately), and opens with Penumbra, a collection of short stories, which is followed by the novels and novellas The Border and Back, Bim Shay, a re-imagining of the detective yarn, Electric Letters Z, a satire on literary celebrity, first published in 1998, which under the title Who's Afraid of the Booker Prize? won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction in 2015, and Caliban's Machine, the memoir of George du Plé, a young English poet in American exile.