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Life
| 1967- ; grew up near Belfast, moving to Dublin in teenage; worked as restauranteur in Galway with her husband; started Creative Writing courses and grad. PhD (QUB); author of The End of the World is a Cul de Sac 2021), stories; and Trespasses (2022) - dealing with a marriage between a Catholic schoolteacher (Cushla Lavery) and an older, married Protestant barrister (Michael Agnew) - and a boy Davy McGeown whom she protects from a predatory priest; named a best book of the year by the Washington Post; suffers from a melanoma and has documented her treatment. |
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Works| Short Fiction |
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Notes
The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (2021): stories on the secrets people kept, the lies they told [...] visceral, stunningly crafted stories [in which] people are effortlessly cruel to one another, and the natural world is a primitive salve. Here, women are domestically trapped by predatorial men, Ireland’s folklore and politics loom large, and poverty - material, emotional, sexual - seeps through every crack. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a ghost estate, with blood on her hands; a young woman is tormented by visions of the man murdered by her brother during the Troubles; a pregnant mother fears the worst as her husband grows illegal cannabis with the help of a vulnerable teenage girl; a woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Announcing a major new voice in literary fiction for the twenty-first century, these sharp shocks of stories offer flashes of beauty, and even humour, amidst the harshness.¨(Bloomsbury notice; COPAC.)
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