Pain Sluts
Pain Sluts – a new collection of short stories published in Autumn 2021 by Storgy Books.
A young woman and her foetus are bizarrely reunited. A teenager performs a defiant striptease in front of the funeral corteges passing her bedroom window. A grieving widow takes on the sinister rapacious treehouse in next door’s garden.
In this new collection of stories, darkly comic and often surreal, a group of disparate individuals seek increasingly unorthodox ways to flee the difficulties of their lives.
Pain Sluts has been shortlisted for the 2022 Wales Book of the Year.
“Exquisite storytelling that punches hard with dark humour.”
– Nation Cymru –
“Touching stories of everyday drama, affection, and dissociation, some flagged with a cosmic backdrop, others, glimpsed through an uncomfortable aura.”
“Sian Hughes’ delightful imagination and technical talent makes each story a unique treat.”
– Boyd Clack –
Creator of High Hopes and Satellite City
“Sian Hughes is an immaculate stylist, and Pain Sluts is one exquisite and harrowing revelation after another. In this magnificent collection, Hughes claims a darkly radiant fictional territory that is all her own.”
– Anthony Trevelyan –
Author of The Weightless World
Longlisted for the 2016 Desmond Elliott Prize
“In this wonderfully visceral collection, with its echoes of AM Homes and the early transgressive short stories of Ian McEwan, Sian Hughes has fashioned her own brand of distinctly South Walian Gothic, full of bodies and their bloody mysteries, people and their hidden perverse selves.”
– John Williams –
Author of The Cardiff Trilogy
“Haunting and hilarious, tender and tumultuous. A bold and original collection that depicts life for women in contemporary south Wales in all its mundanity and quirkiness. Thrills from beginning to end.”
– Rachel Trezise –
Author of Fresh Apples and Easy Meat
Winner of the inaugural 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize
“Laden with love, loss and longing, Pain Sluts illuminates Sian Hughes’s extraordinary ability to create believable characters that brave our brittle world, often in outlandish or unusual ways. Sharp and tender, true and wise, these stories announce the arrival of a uniquely talented new voice in British fiction.”
Tomek Dzido, editor, Storgy.
Get ‘Pain Sluts’ delivered straight to your door or inbox when you click on any of the following links:
https://storgy.com/storgy-books/pain-sluts-by-sian-hughes/
https://www.waterstones.com/book/pain-sluts/sian-hughes/tomek-dzido/9781916325845
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Pain-Sluts-by-Hughes-Sian/9781916325845
A paperback or kindle version or Pain Sluts is also available from the Amazon bookstore via this link:
More of Sian Hughes’s published writings here:
God and the Runt
Hughes. S (issue 78 – Summer 2018) God and the Runt, Scribble magazine
Werewolf
https://thefictionpool.com/2018/07/27/werewolf-by-sian-hughes/
Death and the Teenage Stripper
https://storgy.com/2018/07/23/fiction-death-and-the-teenage-stripper-by-sian-hughes/
Can You Eat the Wind
https://storgy.com/2019/01/09/fiction-can-you-eat-the-wind-by-sian-hughes/
Blow Hole
Hughes. S (issue 75 – Autumn 2017) Blow Hole, Scribble magazine
Shaving for Dog
https://storgy.com/2017/10/27/fiction-shaving-for-dog-by-sian-hughes/
