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.