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‘An exquisite collection from an exciting new voice in short fiction’ Lady
A woman battles bluebottles as she plots an ill-judged encounter with a stranger; a young husband commutes a treacherous route to his job in the city, fearful for the wife and small daughter he has left behind; a mother struggles to understand her nine-year-old son’s obsession with dead birds and the apocalypse.
In Danielle McLaughlin’s stories, the world is both beautiful and alien. Men and women negotiate their surroundings as a tourist might navigate a distant country: watchfully, with a mixture of wonder and apprehension. Here are characters living lives in translation, ever at the mercy of distortions and misunderstandings, striving to make sense both of the spaces they inhabit and of the people they share them with.
A woman battles bluebottles as she plots an ill-judged encounter with a stranger; a young husband commutes a treacherous route to his job in the city, fearful for the wife and small daughter he has left behind; a mother struggles to understand her nine-year-old son’s obsession with dead birds and the apocalypse.
In Danielle McLaughlin’s stories, the world is both beautiful and alien. Men and women negotiate their surroundings as a tourist might navigate a distant country: watchfully, with a mixture of wonder and apprehension. Here are characters living lives in translation, ever at the mercy of distortions and misunderstandings, striving to make sense both of the spaces they inhabit and of the people they share them with.
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Reviews
This is not a debut in the usual sense; a promise of greater things to come. There is no need to ask what Danielle McLaughlin will do next, she has done it already. This book has arrived. I think it will stay with us for a long time
Full of such arresting, resonant and precise writing . . . an impressive achievement
Taut with words unsaid and fights unhad, and the endings are all that endings should be
Fans of short story books will definitely relish this one
McLaughlin has a flair for making her stories crystallise around a striking image
An exquisite collection from an exciting new voice in short fiction
McLaughlin is yet another fantastic new addition to Ireland's burgeoning literary establishment
Her near-faultless debut collection . . . deals primarily with psychological alienation, and the desolate upheaval of humans in crisis
[McLaughlin] writes with a meditative intensity which gives her subject matter (domestic friction and failing affections) a certain gravitas
A quietly explosive collection