Edna O’Brien (2013) Saints and Sinners.

‘Only a fool thinks that women love differently.’  So says a character in one of her short-stories. ‘Fools and pedagogues.’ Saints and Sinners, take your pick. Edna O’Brien offers all of these things and none, because women’s treachery is different to men’s?  

‘Rafferty’, the opening story in the collection. An Irish man in London. He’s been in the English capital all of his working life and now retired longs to return the auld country. He’s loved and lost. Many of his mates taken by the drink and the loneliness. He too had a wife. The drink took care of that. When he gets the chance to go home he finds life is not as you remember it.  

‘Sinners’ is a piece of fluff and faux outrage. An elderly Irish widow, giving her house over to strangers in a B&B. But the proper middle-class couple and their daughter are not what they seem.

‘Madame Cassandra’ is interesting.  In Country Girls, the protagonist visits a psychic who proves to be accurate but treats it as a day job in which shop girls line up for entertainment.

‘My Two Mothers’ has one mother accurately predicting the date and time of her husband’s death. A told you so for such a waster, she’d warned her about.

‘Send My Roots Rain’ (what a lovely title) has Miss Gilhooley taking a chance—perhaps her last chance for love—and is meeting a famous, but not too famous, Irish poet in a posh Dublin hotel. Will he or won’t he—turn up?

‘Green Georgette’ is County Girls rehashed.  A young country farm girl and her beautiful mother hopes of upward social superiority are on the rise when they work a flanker and get invited for afternoon tea at the home of Mrs. Coughlan, the banker’s wife.

‘Old Wounds’ is as the name suggest about family tensions. Bit boring.

‘Manhattan Medley’ is a woman in love with a married man (Country Girls).

‘Plunder,’ In many ways this predicts and pre-empts Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize Winning (2023) Prophet Song.  An Ireland in the dystopian now in which murder and rape are the common currency of the Fatherland.  Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6