Intimacies

"Eleven perfect stories" (Irish Independent) that chart the steps and missteps of young women trying to find their place in the world, including the winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award. "Precise and beautifully controlled fictions but with strange, wild energies pulsing along just beneath the surface. A tremendous collection." --Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter From a Belfast student ordering illegal drugs online to end an unwanted pregnancy to a young mother's brush with mortality; from a Christmas Eve walking the city centre streets when everything seems possible, to a night flight from Canada which could change a life irrevocably, these are stories of love, loss and exile, of new beginnings and lives lived away from "home". Taking in, too, the lives of other women who could be guiding lights - from Monica Lewinsky to Caroline Norton to Sinéad O'Connor - Intimacies offers keenly felt and subtly revealing insights into the heartbreak and hope of young motherhood and modern life.