Nina Allan's stories have appeared in various publications and six "Best of" collections:
Allan's story The Lammas Worm appeared in Strange Tales 3 edited by Rosalie Parker of Tartarus Press in 2010. It was then selected by Ellen Datlow for. The story was re-printed as part of Stardust:The Ruby Castle Stories.
Her story Flying in the Face of God appeared in issue 227 of Interzone in 2010. It was then selected by Gardner Dozois to appear in.
The story The Silver Wind originally appeared in issue 233 of Interzone in 2011. It was reprinted in The Silver Wind and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction 2012 edited by Rich Horton Prime Books. It was also short-listed for BSFA Awards for 2012.
Sunshine appeared in issue 29 of Black Static edited by Andy Cox in 2012. It was selected by Rich Horton for The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013 Prime Books.
Her story The Tiger appeared in Terror Tales of London edited by Paul Finch in 2013. It was then selected by Ellen Datlow for.
She has said that all her short fiction to date has been, "a kind of apprenticeship in novel-writing". Her first novel is The Race, which uses the town of Hastings for its landscape, where she was living for most of the time she was writing it.
Contains the stories "Amethyst", "Ryman's Suitcase", "Bird Songs at Eventide", "Queen South", "The Vicar with Seven Rigs", "Heroes", "Terminus" and "A Thread of Truth".
The Silver Wind, Eibonvale Press,
Contains the stories "Time's Chariot", "My Brother's Keeper", "The Silver Wind", "Rewind" and "Timelines: An Afterword". "Darkroom" added as the opening story, "Chambre noire", in the French edition of the collection, Complications. The Spanish edition, Máquinas del Tiempo keeps the original contents.
Contains the stories "B-Side", "The Lammas Worm", "The Gateway", "Laburnums", "Stardust", "Wreck of the Julia" and the poem "Red Queen". The stories Angelus, Flying in the Face of God and Stardust are connected as they all involve a Russian astrophysicist called Valery Kushnev.
Allan's story Darkroom appeared in Subtle Edens: An Anthology of Slipstream Fiction edited by Allen Ashley Elastic Press in 2008. In a review of the collection Andy Hedgecock wrote that Nina Allan is developing into, "one of the finest stylists of modern genre fiction." He went on to say that very few writers had her talent to uncover, "the strange within the ordinary with such clarity and precision." Paul Kincaid in reviewing The Silver Wind asks when a series of stories can turn into a novel. He wrote that this was when, "the congeries of stories tell us more than any individual stories can." He suggests that this has been achieved and outlines the links between the stories before concluding that the sum of the parts is greater than the individual stories. One of the links is the viewpoint character Martin who appears in different parallel realities. Sofia Samatar however in her review questioned whether or not there is a danger in Allan's experiment of the emotional force being, "more likely to be lost than gained in the leaps between parallel realities." In Peter Tennant's 2014 review of The Race he wrote that this was "one of the finest books" he had read that year, but also wrote that he did not know what it was about and could "only hazard guesses." Although a novel, it is, "four self-contained sections that form a greater whole." Sofia Samatar agrees that "The Race guards its secrets." She writes that, this is "a distancing novel about drawing in, a science fiction novel aware of its own, a literary fiction impatient with mimesis."
