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. Hearts kept in Tupperware boxes, small countries that vanish from the European mainland overnight, and a kidnapper who gets more than he bargained for when his victim associates him with George Clooney.

It could only be Robert Shearman's 'Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical'. Six stories of the comic and the frightening and the downright weird, taken from his multi-award winning short story collection.

"Shearman offers us haunting, nightmare alternatives to our world. He makes each story cling to you, forces you to make sense of it and somehow inhabit it." Steven Moffat, Executive Producer of Doctor Who.

"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 of Best New Horror.

Recorded on: 22- 23 September and 18 October 2010

Recorded at: Moat Studios

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