Mary Lavin’s finest stories, selected by Colm Tóibín.
A vibrant selection of Mary Lavin’s most electric short stories, capturing ordinary lives with quiet humour, heartbreak and sharp emotional truth. Selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín, this collection reasserts Lavin’s place among Ireland’s essential voices.
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An Arrow in Flight
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Mary Lavin’s finest stories, selected by Colm Tóibín.
A vibrant selection of Mary Lavin’s most electric short stories, capturing ordinary lives with quiet humour, heartbreak and sharp emotional truth. Selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín, this collection reasserts Lavin’s place among Ireland’s essential voices.
- Book Synopsis
-
Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight.
'This is a wonderful collection, and a reminder that Mary Lavin was - is - one of Ireland's greatest writers' Roddy Doyle
Mary Lavin's stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness.
Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen.
Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin's work is largely unpublished and overlooked. This collection re-establishes her as one of the most genius, irresistible and memorable voices of the last century.
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TÓIBÍN
'She is, to come right out with it, magnificent' New York Times
'A feast of quiet humour and heartbreak' Emma Donoghue
'Mary Lavin's stories conjure sadness, profundity, hilarity and wildness out of thin air. They are simply masterful' Colin Barrett
'Mary Lavin's stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other' Sunday Times
Ideal for readers who…
- want to discover (or rediscover) a major Irish writer whose work deserves a wider spotlight
- love short stories of “ordinary life” that reveal extraordinary emotional depth and surprise
- enjoy Irish settings—from rural communities to Dublin streets—rendered with sharp intimacy and wit
- are drawn to writing that balances quiet humour with heartbreak, hope, and moral complexity
- like curated collections with strong editorial framing and an introduction by a celebrated writer
- About The Author
- Mary Lavin was an award-winning writer best known for her short stories. Born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, to Irish parents, she returned to live in Ireland as a child and spent most of her life in County Meath, where many of her stories are set. She was a writer under contract to the New Yorker magazine and received many honours, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a number of Guggenheim Fellowships and an honorary doctorate the National University of Ireland. She received the title of Saoi from Aosdána and is the first woman writer to have a public space named after her in Dublin.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781529956481
- Format
- Hardback
- Publisher
- Vintage Classics, (05 March 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 304
- Weight
- 510 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 223 x 146 x 38 mm
- Categories: