There is currently a thrilling, seemingly unstoppable tide of new Irish writing emerging through small literary magazines and presses, with authors such as Sara Baume, Colin Barrett and Mary Costello going on to achieve widespread critical success. Joining them this year will surely be Danielle McLaughlin, whose short stories are set in an Ireland both contemporary and disturbingly unfamiliar. Her near-faultless debut collection, originally published by Stinging Fly, deals primarily with psychological alienation, and the desolate upheaval of humans in crisis.
The adroit placement of many of these dramas away from big city life, in small towns and rural areas – from Cork to Donegal to the particular stretch of the Irish Midlands beloved of John McGahern – acutely highlights the way present-day disaffection extends well beyond the metropolis. In “Along the Heron-Studded River” creeping suspense is sustained as a man, relocated with his family to the remote countryside while commuting to a fractious city office, tries desperately to keep watch over his bipolar wife who has sole daily care of their young daughter. The promise of a new beginning, the first sighting of their house a couple of years before, held an unreal aspect even then: “the farmland all around them in folds of white hills like a bridal gown, jewelled with frost. ‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?’ Cathy had whispered. ‘It’s like Narnia’.”
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