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For The Love Of StoriesBig Finish produce fantastic full-cast audio dramas for CD and download.

Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (Leatherbound)
Big Finish Books

Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (Leatherbound)

Released December 2009

Written by Robert Shearman

Out of print

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The first love song in the world, as composed by a pig in the Garden of Eden.

The Devil, alarmed when his hobby of writing romantic fiction begins to upstage his day job.

A man finding love with someone who has an allergy to his happiness.

Another losing love altogther when his wife gives him back his heart in a Tupperware box.

By turns macabre and moving, horrific and laugh-out-loud funny, Robert Shearman's short stories come from a place just to the left of the corner of your eye. Following his World Fantasy Award-winning Tiny Deaths, this new collection puts a bizarre twist on the love story. What is love, why does it hurt so much, and how is it we keep coming back for more?

Love Songs is sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel - but always as startling and fresh as Shearman's fans have come to expect.

With a forward by Steven Hall.

 

WINNER OF THE READERS' AWARD IN THE EDGE HILL UNIVERSITY SHORT STORY COMPETITION!

WINNER OF THE BRITISH FANTASY AWARD FOR BEST COLLECTION!

Tiny Deaths, Rob’s first collection of short stories, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It won the World Fantasy Award for best collection, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. One of the stories from it was selected by the National Library Board of Singapore as part of the annual Read! Singapore campaign.

Rob was one of the writers for the BAFTA award-winning first series of the revived Doctor Who series starring Christopher Eccleston. His episode, Dalek, was runner-up for a Hugo Award, and his award-winning contributions to the audio range of Doctor Who released by Big Finish have been broadcast on BBC Radio. He was also one of the writers of the bestselling Doctor Who novel for BBC Books, The Story of Martha. He also contributed to the second series of BBC1’s Born and Bred.

In 2008 his short story project for BBC7, The Chain Gang, won him a Sony Award, and he provided a second series for them in 2009. Other stories have been broadcast by the BBC on Radio 3 and Radio 4. His many plays for Radio 4, produced by Martin Jarvis, include Inappropriate Behaviour, Afternoons with Roger, Forever Mine, Towards the End of the Morning, Teacher’s Pet and Odd.

STORIES

  1. Love Among the Lobelias
  2. Roadkill
  3. Sweet Nothings
  4. Pang
  5. This Creeping Thing
  6. 14.2
  7. Your Long, Loving Arms
  8. At the Crease
  9. Luxembourg
  10. Sharp
  11. Be of Good Cheer
  12. Jolly Roger
  13. Crumble
  14. George Clooney’s Moustache
  15. Love in a Time of Sharing
  16. Not About Love
  17. One Last Love Song

PRAISE FOR ROBERT SHEARMAN:

Shearman offers us haunting, nightmare alternatives to our world that are still somehow utterly recognisable thanks to the way he always picks out the comically mundane among the impossible and the fantastical. He makes each story cling to you, forces you to make sense of it and somehow inhabit it. Steven Moffat, executive producer and Hugo award winning writer of Doctor Who

Rob Shearman is a truly unique voice... His peculiar fantasies of our emotional lives, full of eccentric surprises and exquisite absurdities, tell the secret life of love in all its silly glory. Stephen Volk, author of Ghostwatch and Afterlife

His stories are like the bastard offspring of Philip K Dick and Jonathan Carroll, but with a quirky personality that is completely their own. Stephen Jones, World Fantasy award winning editor, Best New Horror

Robert Shearman has surpassed his incredible debut, Tiny Deaths, with this second collection, which is even better... His stories are numinous, incisive and devastating, by turns hilariously funny and unbearably sad. Mark Morris, British Fantasy Award winner, author of The Deluge

Shearman has called his stories 'love songs' and rightly so - like the best love songs, they go straight to your heart, and haunt your memory. Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of Millions, winner of the Carnegie Medal

Rob Shearman is one of those rare writers who knows that reality can’t be pinned down. These stories lift off. They do loop-de-loops. They glide from the mundane to the marvellous, from the dark to the delicious. His stories soar over the landscape of the human heart and return us dizzy, delighted and moved. Alison Macleod, author of Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction.

AGE: Teen - adult BINDING: Leatherbound
TRIMMED SIZE: 211 x 135 mm EXTENT 240 pp
  • Product Format: hardback (medium deluxe)
  • Physical Retail ISBN: 978-1-84435-461-0
  • Digital Retail ISBN: n/a
  • Production Code: BFPBKROB01
Previous release in this range: Everyone's Just So So Special (Paperback)
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