Description

‘I get the feeling that Liadan Ni Chuinn would hate the term “voice of a generation”, but it may be foisted on them nonetheless – and with good reason’ Sunday Times

A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine’s bones. Bouquets are found all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect a human body. Brimming with compassion and thrumming with energy, these stories are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope. In this bravura debut collection, Liadan Ni Chuinn delivers a consummate blend of the personal and the political.

Publisher Review

This is a brilliant and remarkable book… Immediately asks to be considered among the island’s signal 21st-century literary achievements… These stories open out and close again in strange folds and planes. They operate like some theoretical shape in geometry that has more surfaces than are physically possible – they are Escher houses, Klein bottles. Or human minds… In this extraordinary capacity to embody process – in this context, another word for human consciousness – lies the essence of this superb book’s quietly radical realism — Kevin Power * Irish Times * Here’s a writer who knows how to swerve gracefully from the expected. Her work is instinctive, intriguing and truly exciting. I cannot wait to see what’s in store for her — Lisa McInerney It’s a long time since I’ve read a short story collection where I’ve felt such an aching tenderness for the people within its pages… These stories are rich. They have heart and weight. This is singular, controlled, dextrous writing from someone who is now one of my favourite writers — Wendy Erskine A phenomenal collection – these stories have a poise, a precision, an anger, a melancholy, a way of skewering things, that is entirely Ni Chuinn’s own. A formidable debut by an astonishing new voice — Lucy Caldwell These are exceptional stories, stark yet richly textured and told in a voice that is at once plain-spoken and lyrical. Liadan Ni Chuinn is the real deal — Louise Kennedy An extraordinary book by an extraordinary author who refuses to look the other way. Ni Chuinn’s incantatory sentences quiver like seismographs, registering the quakes and ruptures that can crack a life in two — Thomas Morris Liadan Ni Chuinn is a phenomenal writer, with such a striking, distinctive style. Surreal and yet vivid, wondrous and stark… It’s like nothing else. Something new and startling is happening in this work. Fiction is being rejuvenated again. Anything seems possible — Danny Denton These are exceptional stories – and necessary reading, rendering lives, connections, violence, and trauma in ways that are utterly transformative — Neil Hegarty This book creates an integrated kaleidoscope – a contradiction of course – which each of these stories manages adroitly. The local dialect of History comes teeming slowly in, shocking us with its immutable presence. And here’s a really important thing, I wanted to keep reading — Evelyn Conlon An exciting new voice on the literary scene… These are tales of intergenerational trauma, dislocation and isolation. Ni Chuinn’s characters are varied, de-stabilised by events beyond their control, but still here, fully alive on the page… Outstanding… This is a stunning debut * Irish Independent *