Mr Jolly - Short StoriesPaperback, 25 February 2016

Mr Jolly is the first collection of short stories by Michael Stewart, and contains some of the award-winning novelist's most extraordinary writing to date. Each tale offers a unique, utterly compelling insight into the human condition, framed by a mind-bendingly original concept that no other writer working today could - or indeed would - have concocted.

Readers will meet a conformity-obsessed league of bald men, breaking into homes for an extended debate about the nature of freedom; discuss the nomenclature of the marshmallow with a man whose single goal in life is to witness them accidentally skewered on stiletto heels; and meet God, in perhaps the most frustrating (yet believable) depiction of the divine being in modern literature.

Last phone calls, alien abductions, murders and more are grounded in stories of struggling parents, baffled lovers and lost children (some of who may live permanently on
the number 606 bus). However long you live, and however much you read, you'll never come across another book quite like this.