"A man leaves his idyllic home in the country each day, only to sit in his work cubicle and worry about his fragile, unstable wife, and their son who is in her care. A girl from Dublin visits her boyfriend’s home turf in Donegal, in Northern Ireland, and is shaken by what she encounters there, on a beach in the middle of the night.
In this debut short story collection, centered on the lives of families and individuals in post-crash Ireland, Danielle McLaughlin is unafraid to zero in on the pocked surfaces of a life—the strange, unsettling, and sometimes, downright disturbing. Beneath the thumping and dying of dreams, the ache of disillusionment, and the fear that haunts us all, the stories seem to say, there lies a subtle beauty."
Publisher Random House
Publication Date 2016-08-09
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Hannah J.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780812998429
For fans of Alice Munro, Anne Enright, and William Trevor comes a stunning debut collection from a deeply original writer and observer of love, betrayal, and turning points in ordinary peoples’ lives.
In a raw seacoast cabin, a young woman watches her boyfriend go out with his brother, late one night, on a mysterious job she realizes she isn’t supposed to know about. A man gets a call at work from his sister-in-law, saying that his wife and his daughter never made it to nursery school that day. A mother learns that her teenage daughter has told a teacher about problems in her parents’ marriage that were meant to be private—problems the mother herself tries to ignore. McLaughlin conveys these characters so vividly that readers will feel they are experiencing real life. Often the stories turn on a single, fantastic moment of clarity—after which nothing can be the same.
Danielle McLaughlin is a writer of unparalleled precision and uncommon imagination. In her deft hands, ordinary people are transformed and surprising truths are suddenly understood.
