Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical

Hello, all!

Those nice people at Big Finish have just put up my new collection of short stories on their website, available for pre-order!

I am very excited about this. It's my first book since Tiny Deaths, which picked up the World Fantasy Award last year. And like it, it's a series of quirky stories - some of them funny, some of them a bit disturbing, and all of them focussed upon love and our attiudes towards it.

I see it as a bit of a self-help manual. What do you do when your wife leaves you, and presents you with your own heart in a Tupperware box? (And what happens when each morning the wretched thing starts to grow bones?) How can you cope when you lose your husband on a business trip to Europe, when the entire country of Luxembourg he's visiting just disappears overnight? How do you weigh your fiance's heart for love, to find out *exactly* what percentage of it belongs to you - what's the right way to behave when the ghost of your childhood cat keeps sitting on your bed whenever you try to find a new sexual partner - is it worth pursuing a relationship with a woman who has a physical allergy to your very own happiness?

Useful stuff. And there are stories too about the Devil's efforts at writing romantic fiction, the first love song in the world as composed by a pig in the Garden of Eden, and how a husband allows his new job as a tree to come between him and the family he's providing for.

Eighteen tales of the weird and the uncanny. I'm honestly very proud of it.

www.bigfinish.com/ranges/love-songs-for-the-shy-and-cynical

There are three editions available for sale now. There's a standard hardback. There's a leatherbound limited edition. And there's an extra special limited edition, also leatherbound, which contains a story handwritten by me in letter form. There are fifty of them, and the story's over a thousand words, so that really hurt my wrists. The book was put up on the site yesterday, and over a quarter of the copies of that edition have already been sold, so you may want to order that one quickly if you want it. A paperback edition will follow some time later in 2010.

I'll give a proper update on stuff and be a bit more chatty soon - but thanks for reading such a blatant advertisement. I'll be no doubt talking more about book launches and readings all over the place as well pretty shortly - in as many countries as I can!

xxx