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 - Joseph O'Connor's first collection in more than twenty years - 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.

Joseph OConnor was born in Dublin. His books include seven previous novels:Cowboys and Indians(Whitbread Prize shortlist),Desperadoes,The Salesman,Inishowen,Star of the Sea(American Library Association Award, Irish Post Award for Fiction, Frances Prix Millepages, Italys Premio Acerbi, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European novel of the year),Redemption FallsandGhost Light(Dublin One City One Book Novel 2011). His fiction has been translated into forty languages. He received the 2012 Irish PEN Award for outstanding achievement in literature and in 2014 he was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

www.josephoconnorauthor.com