So what are “linked stories”?   Here is what the library’s Cataloguers staff tell me: 

Linked stories are short stories with a common thread. Some might term them as “a novel in stories”.  Essentially a larger story that is told through several smaller stories. The common thread might be characters / subject matter / or locale etc.

Here are five collections that you may enjoy.

The Midnight Promise : a detective’s story in ten cases (M)
by Zane Lovitt

The story of detective John Dorn told in ten cases. The “cases” are as different as can be, but each one reveals a little more of Dorn’s own troubled past and his dire present, leading to a final confrontation with his arch nemesis: himself.

Communion Town: a city in ten chapters (M) by Sam Thompson

“This is the story of a place that never looks the same way twice: a place imagined anew by each citizen who walks through the changing streets, among voices half-heard, signs half-glimpsed and desires half-acknowledged.” – Publisher.

A History of the Present Illness: stories (M)
by Louise Aronson

Sixteen linked stories explore the marginalized humanity in communities, hospitals, and nursing homes in San Francisco, including an elderly Chinese immigrant who is forced to make a painful sacrifice and a young veteran whose injuries symbolize the rest of his life.

News From Heaven: the Bakerton stories (M)
by Jennifer Haigh

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding–sometimes cruelly – succeeding generations to the place that made them.

When It Happens to You: a novel in stories (M)
by Molly Ringwald

A collection of interlinked stories follows a Los Angeles family and their friends and neighbors as they negotiate the deceptions and heartbreaks of everyday life.