One for sorrow and other stories

Glavin, Anthony

Poolbeg Press

<p>Maeve Maguire, single mother of a teenage daughter, works as the Senior Nurse in a Dublin Home for the Elderly. Grieving over her father’s recent death, she begins to keep a notebook at the prompting of her sagacious counsellor Sister Úna, who suggests she write down memories of her Boston childhood, along with whatever else. Reluctantly Maeve begins to bring the past to life, recording memories of growing up in an apartment building on the Boston Common where her Mayo father James worked as Superintendent. Gradually from her notebook entries there emerges another, more subterranean, sorrow—that of the death of her emotionally complex mother Rose, thirteen years before. What’s more, Maeve also confronts a handful of other home truths therein: regarding love, single motherhood, and the demanding, if at times comic, challenges of her nursing day-job. A canny, captivating, humorous portrayal of a Boston-Irish woman’s struggle to find her feet, love, and a quotient of tranquillity in 1980s dirty ol’ Dublin.</p>

Colours Other Than Blue

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Ward River Press

Set variously in Donegal, Dublin, Boston, Nicaragua and Majorca, the stories in The Draughtsman and the Unicorn charts the bittersweet and comic misadventures of its protagonists as they encounter such mysteries as love, betrayal and mortality: a policeman on holidays suddenly confronted with the nature of his trade; a mother haunted by a childhood hoax; a young woman who fancies herself as the last unicorn. Ambient and enchanting, Glavin's second short story collection (his first, One For Sorrow) offers a series of slowly revealed, unexpected and often devastating insights into the nuances and vagaries of the human condition. 'Astonishingly accomplished and evocative' --The Irish Times

The Draughtsman and the Unicorn: Stories

British & Irish

New Island Books

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