The Half-Life of Songs

Synopsis

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.

The Half-Life of Songs is the long-anticipated sequel to David Gaffney’s critically acclaimed collection of flash fiction, Sawn Off Tales, in which he managed to cram whole plot arcs and 3D characters into tiny broken shards of fiction. In this latest collection of micro stories, David Gaffney opens up a world where thinking is illegal, where belly dancers’ blood is used to fertilize tomato plants, where pensioners in leather trousers dance to two-step garage, and where an architect steals crested newts and hides them in his bath. The stories are 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.

Reviews of this Book

‘About Sawn Off Tales

Witty, clever, poignant, Gaffney's micro fictions work as funny routines, moving insights and illuminating character sketches.

’ —Time Out

‘About Sawn off Tales:

Utterly brilliant. Hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct. David Gaffney’s Sawn-Off Tales are little McNuggets of pure gold.’ —Graham Rawle

‘About Sawn Off Tales:

Sad, funny fables recalling evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.’ —Nicholas Clee

‘Gaffney has produced the kind of book that makes you wish you spent more time locked in your imagination and less time dismissing irreverent thoughts. I wish Gaffney was allowed 15 minutes of time with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to make his vision come to life.’ —Lianne Steinbery

‘About Aromabingo:

A triumph of the blurring of literary boundaries with a dose of unabashed comic bravura and honouring British writing with the awkward, self-conscious, yet jagged aplomb it so deservedly needs.’ —The Short Review

‘About Aromabingo:

Offbeat, unsettling and yet frequently hilarious, Aromabingo is a solid step on from the accomplished Sawn Off Tales and proof that David Gaffney is one of those names to watch.’ —Bookmunch

‘About Never Never:

Gaffney’s strength is creating strong characters, and this debut brims with them. With a ruthless eye and pitch-black humour, Gaffney explores a consumer culture in which exploiting the welfare system is both a necessity and an addiction, and in which hypocrisy is endemic’ —The Observer

‘Loaded with potent charges, insidious and cumulative in their effects. In Gaffney’s fiction thoughts take physical form, and the material world has a surreal vitality … The stories are sometimes haunting, and sometimes comic. The Half-life is an appropriate metaphor for the lingering effect they have on the reader.’ —Nicholas Clee