Where Have You Been? - Softcover

O'Connor, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099565455 ISBN 13: 9780099565451

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2013

Synopsis

Where Have You Been? is award-winning novelist Joseph O'Connor's first collection of short stories in more than twenty years.

     Ranging from urgently contemporary London and Dublin to New York's Lower East Side in the nineteenth century, from dark comedy to poignancy, from the wryly provocative to the quietly beautiful, these stories offer a gathering of dreamers and lost souls who contend with the confusions of living.

     Here are men without women, children parenting parents, residents of the uncertain country that is post-boom Ireland, emigrants, travellers, cheats and lovers, families, friends and foes. The focus is on those moments of the everyday when possibility seems to appear. A football match becomes an occasion of hard-won acceptances. An old acquaintance re-encountered plays mind-games in a bar. A fling between people who have almost nothing in common alters their lives forever. In Dublin, a desperately ill woman meets a tour guide in a hotel. A civil servant drives his father into Wicklow to say a final goodbye. A boy comes of age in a seaside town where everything is about to change.

     Where Have You Been? is a powerfully moving, entertaining and life-affirming read, from the internationally acclaimed author of Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls and Ghost Light.

About this title

About the Author:

JOSEPH O'CONNOR was born in Dublin. His novels include Cowboys and Indians (Whitbread Prize shortlist), Star of the Sea (Irish Post Award for Fiction, France's Prix Millepages, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year), Redemption Falls, and Ghost Light (Dublin One City One Book Novel, 2011). In 2012 he won the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature. His work has been published in thirty-five languages.

Review:

"A masterclass display of versatility...mood and style in these richly concise, crisply written pieces are confidently varied, too...adding vitality to the virtuosity is a terrific ear for idiomatic speech" * Sunday Times Books of the Year * "O'Connor's first collection of short stories for 20 years reasserts a mastery of the form... An exhilarating array of sharp dialogue and biting one-liners... A fine compassionate collection" * Irish Independent * "Full of lovely, delicate perceptive stuff. Joseph O'Connor is in the tradition of masterly Irish writers of short fiction" * The Scotsman * "Joseph O'Connor's first short story collection in more than 20 years is worth the wait" -- Emma Hagestadt * Independent * "Playful but also at times sorrowful; it allows in great quantities of life, offering the dramas at times a dark edge but also the full glory of our earthly confusion." -- Colm Toibin * Irish Times *

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0099565455
• ISBN 13: 9780099565451
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336