Mary Lavin

Colm Toibin

Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They're important work

She is, to come right out with it, magnificent

She reminds us…what literature is about

Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other

She fascinates me more than any other of the Irish writers of my generation

Mary Lavin is keeping the stronghold of the Irish story in first-rate repair

Mary Lavin's prose has the simplicity and glow of time-polished wood

Caustic and also lyrical, she sees Ireland, even in its most obscure aspects, with a visionary penetration

These sombre and skilfully written stories describe the tragic dilemmas with which character and nature confront humans everywhere

No one writing in Ireland today can penetrate more unerringly to the very essence of individual Irish character than Mary Lavin

Mary Lavin’s ability to transcribe the physical world, especially the green damp world of rural Ireland where many of her stories are set, is as remarkable as ever

No one writes better than she does about the constrictions on body and consciousness in Ireland, or describes their effects with more conviction

Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight. 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TÓIBÍN 
 
Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen. 
 
Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin’s work is largely unpublished and overlooked. This collection re-establishes her as one of the most genius, irresistible and memorable voices of the last century. 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TOÍBÍN 
 
‘She is, to come right out with it, magnificent’ New York Times 
 
‘Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other’ Sunday Times 
 
‘Lavin writes like a dream’ New York Times Book Review

Mary Lavin

Praise for An Arrow in Flight

Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They're important work

She is, to come right out with it, magnificent

She reminds us…what literature is about

Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They're important work

She is, to come right out with it, magnificent

She reminds us…what literature is about

Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They're important work

She is, to come right out with it, magnificent

She reminds us…what literature is about

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