Maggie Armstrong & Mike McCormack

Old Romantics, Maggie Armstrong’s debut is a collection of alternative romances told from a netherworld of love and disenchantment. These stories, at once familiar and strange, follow the interior biography of an indistinct Dublin woman, from early adulthood into motherhood and the trials of young family life right up to the pandemic. Slippery, flawed and acute, Maggie Armstrong’s narrator navigates a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility.

A woman pursues a man who cut ahead of her in a line. Two nice people report that a child is being left unsupervised at a local beach. Chance meetings, spontaneous trips away, and the thrill of the new: the anticipation and the ardour, the disappointment and casual disregard. Romances, old and new, shift and sour.

This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack is at once a charged thriller of crime and absolution and a metaphysical enquiry into fractured society, fatherhood and the lengths a man might go to in order to save what he loves.

Someone out there believes Nealon has a plan, a global blueprint for nothing less than a whole new beginning. But Nealon has other things on his mind. Returning home after the collapse of his trial he finds himself alone in a cold empty house. No heat or light, no sign of his wife or child anywhere. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed.  Barely in the door, Nealon’s phone rings. The caller claims to know what’s happened to Nealon’s family. The man will tell him all that he needs to know in return for a conversation – that’s all the caller wants, an exchange of views. It’s an offer Nealon can’t refuse.