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 for the Shy and Cynical is sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel - but always as startling and fresh as Shearman's fans have come to expect.

Winner of the Readers' Award in the Edge Hill University Short Story Competition

Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection

PRAISE FOR LOVE SONGS FOR THE SHY AND CYNICAL

"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