Tag Archives: the irish times

Birdie – Irish Times Review

I’m very pleased with this review of my historical flash fiction chapbook, Birdie, in today’s Irish Times. Thanks to Ruth McKee.

Birdie
By Nuala O’Connor
Arlen House, €10.00 Sat, Dec 5, 2020, 06:00


As you would expect from O’Connor, this collection of flash fiction is a menagerie of exquisite language. The stories transport us to moments in time, and to no-time, as the author paints fragments of history that are palpable with characters who come alive in a brushstroke. Artists and sitters are here as are servants, soldiers, mothers and sisters in stories of losing, longing, and home. Historical fiction can sometimes be clogged with research – not so in these stories which are glances, swift and sensory, with grace-notes of details to let us recognise where we are. Here is the “crookedness of nature,” the lure and lore of home but also the emigrant, the lost lover, the perished child. This collection takes us from the olagón to the “shale-and-ripple of a shell”: a pearl. – Ruth McKee