Book description
Where Have You Been? is award-winning novelist Joseph
O'Connor's first collection of short stories in more than twenty
years.
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 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. The
focus is on those moments of the everyday when possibility seems to
appear. A football match becomes an occasion of hard-won acceptances.
An old acquaintance re-encountered plays mind-games in a bar. A fling
between people who have almost nothing in common alters their lives
forever. In Dublin, a desperately ill woman meets a tour guide in a
hotel. A civil servant drives his father into Wicklow to say a final
goodbye. A boy comes of age in a seaside town where everything is
about to change.
Where Have You Been? is a powerfully moving, entertaining and
life-affirming read, from the internationally acclaimed author of
Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls and Ghost Light.
Joseph O'Connor was born in Dublin. His novels include Cowboys
and Indians (Whitbread Prize shortlist), Star of the Sea
(Irish Post Award for Fiction, France's Prix
Millepages, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year),
Redemption Falls, and Ghost Light (Dublin One City One
Book Novel, 2011). In 2012 he won the Irish PEN Award for
Outstanding Achievement in Literature. His work has been published in
thirty-five languages.
www. josephoconnorauthor. com
