Strong Pagans and other stories

The Ireland portrayed in these stories is a complicated and self-conscious modern country, where safe old pieties have gone and have been replaced by individual responsibility. O'Donnell focuses on that shadowy area of relationships which are beginning to fissure apart, and her characters are often wised-up, clued-in people who are constantly discovering that they haven't, in fact, got the measure of one another. She writes about women - their courage and self-doubt; their understanding of their male partners; their vulnerability as mothers and daughters. The stories are darkly beautiful, the product of a powerful imagination.