Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love

A collection of short stories from a wholly new voice – Dan Rhodes takes the sickly sweetness out of love and travels along its sour, sharp curves.

Erotic, passionate, tragic or doomed, love is above all a game of allusiveness and nuance, of fabulous grotesques and intimate loathings. In this collection, Dan Rhodes takes fables and spins them into suburban romances, twists domestic cosiness into mythical combat. Love for a Vietnamese cellist drives a man to transform himself into her cello; love is found on a council refuse site between an unnamed narrator and the ghostly Maria; the love of The Artist for his female muse consumes him, the search party sent to find him, the villagers who discover his mouldering body – all eaten by the small creatures of the forest. Against a backdrop reminiscent of Angela Carter with a sense of the emotionally horrid that would quieten even Will Self, Dan Rhodes has produced a spellbinding, haunting collection of timeless tales.