The Half-Life of Songs

This is David Gaffney's latest collection of micro stories. We see a world where thinking is illegal, belly dancers' blood is used to fertilize tomato plants, pensioners in leather trousers dance to two-step garage, and an architect steals crested newts and hides them in his bath. The stories are often beyond odd yet always ordinary, a warped backward-talking world of Lynchian surreality, allowing an emotional insight into the rich interior lives of social outsiders, the broken and the easily-breakable, perpetually on the fringes of our world.