The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales Book

Winner of the Scott Prize

Winner of the 2015 Polari First Book Prize

Winner of the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection

The Herald: Book of the Year 2014

Shortlisted for the 2014 Green Carnation Prize

Twenty tales of lust and loss. These stories feature clockwork hearts, lascivious queens, paper men, island circuses, and a flooded world.

On the island of Skye, an antlered girl and a tiger-tailed boy resolve never to be friends – but can they resist their unique connection?

In an alternative 19th-century Paris, a love triangle emerges between a man, a woman, and a coin-operated boy.

A teenager deals with his sister's death by escaping from their tiny Scottish island – but will she let him leave

In 1920s New Orleans, a young girl comes of age in her mother's brothel.

Some of these stories are radical retellings of classic tales, some are modern-day fables, but all explore substitutions for love.

"Kirsty Logan has been slated as a writer to watch, and alongside winning the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection, The Rental Heart has been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The stories within are inventive, beautiful, and shocking by turn, and the collection is one worthy of praise and awards."
Author: Rebecca Burns Source: Sabotage Reviews

"Many, many people told me how much I would love The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales and they were all completely right. It is one of those collections that I will return to and simply pick a tale at random and know I will be lost with a whole world after a few sentences. It is also a collection that has grown on me more and more since I read it."
Author: Simon Savidge Source: Savidge Reads

"Open Kirsty Logan’s debut collection, and you’ll be met first with the title story, which broadly sets the tone for what is to come. The Rental Heart takes us to a version of reality in which people fit themselves with mechanical hearts each time they fall in love – hearts that fail when that love ends. Logan’s narrator talks us through a string of relationships in abstract, evocative language."
Author: David Hebblethwaite Source: Shiny New Books

"Your body is the story of you―its yearnings, fulfilled and otherwise, what you allow it, what others do to it, what you yourself inflict upon it. The stories in The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, Kirsty Logan's first book, dwell in the territory of the body. Though the book's themes are moving and serious, a lively and frank voice lifts the stories from potentially grim territory. The variety in form, from flash fiction and multiple point of view story-sequences, to fairy tale retellings and longer stories clocking in around 15 pages, helps to keep the collection dynamic and delightfully readable. Many of the stories have been published previously and some are award-winners, including the stunning "Witch," noted in Best Lesbian Erotica 2011."
Author: Margaret Luongo Source: Fiction Southeast