Written over the course of ten years, while the author has been living in America’s northeast and southeast, Mary O’Donoghue’s stories in The Hour After Happy Hour reach into the wounds of immigration, transit, and exile. Here are modern, surreal dilemmas of rootlessness and failed returns. Here are people in their middle years struggling to be considered, let alone understood, in the fearsome day-to-day of the twenty-first century. Here too are the borders and battlefronts between parents and children. In each of these stories language is a first and last resort, and every sentence holds the force of fate.
“Measured and ceaselessly inventive stories that are full of artistry.” — Mike McCormack
“With her delicate touch, keen intelligence, and fine ear for the nuances of language, Mary O’Donoghue explores the restless tension between the pursuit of ‘a brighter life’, and the irresistible pull of home that’s forever fraught with difficulty and complication.” — Carys Davies
A brilliantly warm, witty and moving portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heart-rending short stories. Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone In these ten, beautifully moving short stories mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times.
A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness, and the shifting of history underneath our feet.
ISBN 9781529115024