‘A dazzling, heartbreaking debut collection’ Guardian

‘Kennedy’s voice, and her unforgiving gaze, are electric’ Sunday Times

‘These stories sing, haunt and inspire laughter … One of the best collections I’ve read in years’ Sinead Gleeson

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

The secrets people kept, the lies they told.

In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories, 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 harshest of truths.