The Exploding Boy and other tiny tales [Kindle Edition]

`The Exploding Boy and other tiny tales' has an otherworldliness about it which you'll either love or hate (I loved it). Each short story starts with a killer first line which hooks you in from the first instant ("We are in need of a new type of fire", "I once knew a boy who had stones for eyes"). And the whimsical tone means you can just enjoy the stories for what they are without bemoaning the fact that there's often no explanation for what's going on.

There are 42 stories here so you're definitely getting the right amount of bang for your buck. Even though some of them are almost unbearably short (less than a Kindle page), the bite-sized nature of them adds to their appeal. My personal favourite is `the field of ladders', one of the meatier tales in the book. It's about, obviously, a field of ladders and has some genuinely surprising imagery - you can picture everything in it perfectly.

If you like your stories a bit out of left field, this is definitely the book for you. Well worth a download.

I really like this book. It's very quirky and original - the only author I can really compare it to is George Saunders. There's a lot of weirdness going on, but contained, directed and oddly satisfying weirdness. Probably my favourite is The Boyle Curriculum, in which a primary school teacher devotes more and more time to telling his class about the overbearing ways of his older brother Boyle: "What sort of man is Boyle?", he asks rhetorically. What's lovely is how the children become obsessed with Boyle and the many ways in which he's a dick to his little brother - there's something cosy and slightly disturbing about it. In fact, you could say that about the whole book.

I also really liked Field of Ladders, which is about a field full of ladders, and which I won't describe further because it would spoil it for you. Oh, and then there's the one about the Jackson passports, which I find myself thinking about mysteriously often, considering how short it is. And "The Minister of Defence forgets" - I'd quite like to read a full book of that. Weirdly, none of those are mentioned in the Guardian's review of this book - the reviewer liked a completely different set of stories.

Not every one of them is brilliant: I didn't understand a word of "Found report: idea for a photon cannon" (am I being stupid?) and some are more or less one-paragraph jokes, which didn't feel as satisfying to me as the longer ones (though I loved "The Dogs"). But I digress: I really like this book. It's particularly good to read at bedtime.