Intimacies: Winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award

"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.

Lucy Caldwell is the author of three novels, one short story collection, Multitudes, and several stage plays & radio dramas. Her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, a Fiction Uncovered Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2019, she edited Being Various, the latest volume in the ongoing Faber series of New Irish Short Stories.