Riptide: v. 5: Short Stories with an Undercurrent

by Robert Shearman

Riptide Volume 5, guest-edited by Jane Feaver contains 16 new stories, each in some way concerned with Flight in the sense of aeroplanes, flight in the sense of escape, flight in the sense of journeys, evasion, invention.

Robert Shearman’s ‘Coming in to Land’ kicks off the collection with a surreal take on faith and flight paths. In ‘Café Bohemia’ Alison MacLeod’s ‘strikingly original voice’ (The Guardian) takes us into an unsettling world of limitless rooms and Adam Marek brings his ‘genuine, unsettling talent’ (The Independent) to the streets of Cambridge, teeming with dead alumni.

Luke Kennard has written a thought-provoking introduction to this collection which also contains stories by Ginny Baily, Jane Rogers, Jane Rusbridge, Matt Thorne, Jenny Newman, Sally Flint, Jo Lloyd, Nicholas Royle, Zoe Teale, Wena Poon. Karen Stevens, Eleanor Knight and Alison Napier.

Paperback

First published August 14, 2013

About the author

Robert Shearman has worked as a writer for television, radio and the stage. He was appointed resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and has received several international awards for his theatrical work, including the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His plays have been regularly produced by Alan Ayckbourn, and on BBC Radio by Martin Jarvis. However, he is probably best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA winning first series, in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

His first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It won the World Fantasy Award for best collection, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. One of the stories from it was selected by the National Library Board of Singapore as part of the annual Read! Singapore campaign. In 2008 his short story project for BBC7, The Chain Gang, won him a Sony Award, and he provided a second series for them in 2009.

He is now at work on his first novel.