Nuala Ní Chonchúir

This, the 3rd annual anthology from National Flash-Fiction Day, sees a wide range of writers telling us their carefully crafted stories about the wonders of the world and beyond. Given the theme of 'The Senses' these writers have responded in unexpected ways to produce tales of love and betrayal, hope and despair, life and death. Writers include sci-fi and crime best-seller Michael Marshall Smith, crime novelist Sarah Hillary, Costa Short-Story Prize 2014 winner Angela Readman, NFFD Director Calum Kerr and a host of others including Nuala N Chonch ir, Nik Perring, Nigel McLoughlin, Cathy Bryant, Tim Stevenson, Tania Hershman and Jon Pinnock. This is a wonderful collection of stories, show-casing the vital state of flash-fiction today.

The twenty-two stories in this collection explore themes of adult-child relationships, death and violence, and the Irish sense of place. These are essential stories about families and relationships under strain; there is love and betrayal, sickness and passing, humour and rivalry, all told in a mix of adult and child voices, each voice as honest as the last.

At the heart of this radical new collection of short stories from award-winning writer Nuala Ni Chonchuir is an exploration of the pain and pleasure of love: sexual love, romantic love, the love between parents and their children. Expanding on the themes of her first short fiction collection, The Wind Across the Grass, her focus in these stories is on the events that cause relationships to fail. Set against a backdrop of contemporary Ireland, and Europe of the past and present, they are brimming with sensuality, art, secrets, and loss.

The women and men in Nude play out their desires and frustrations from Dublin to Paris, Delhi to Barcelona, and beyond. In these stories there are mercurial lovers, illicit affairs and mistakes that cannot be undone. And at the centre of it all is the unclothed body: in bedrooms, in art, and in and out of love. Award-winning writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir uses her trademark sensual frankness, coupled with poetic language, to weave an intoxicating spell in these stories. If fictional worlds pivot on yearning, then the characters in these stories yearn for passion, for understanding and, sometimes, for freedom. In the opening tale, a naive painter travels to early 1970’s Paris and meets fellow Irish artist Micheal O’Farrell; there she becomes the model for his iconic political nude ‘Madonna Irlanda’. Elsewhere, a master art forger is infatuated with his lovingly carved alabaster sculpture of an Egyptian princess, but he eventually falls foul of the Art Squad and loses everything. The story ‘Sloe Wine’ sees two teenage cousins begin a closer relationship with each other, while their mothers untangle the knots of their own teenage years and, in so doing, unleash a family secret. These are lush stories of visual art, the heart and the body, in all their beauties and betrayals; there is humour and quirkiness, but beneath that is the reassurance of truth – the hallmark of all quality fiction.

This volume combines new collections by established authors Deirdre Brennan and Máighréad Medbh with a collection by emerging author Nuala Ní Chonchúir. The diversity of their work reveals much skill and insight with astute observations—sometimes comical, sometimes sad—on the human condition and the world around us.