“Anto, singing the night away and wobbling out the door at 1:30 to the fading holler of the barman Big Tim’s voice saying, ‘Come on, time to go home now gents and ladies, have yuh no homes to go to.’”
“Mark’s halfway across when The Dude takes the corner goin at least 60. Which tells Mark that The Dude either . . .” A new short story from poet, author and editor Dave Lordan.
When a young Silicon Docks worker finds himself in possession of a homeless man’s ragged Lidl bag, it triggers a series of events that lead him to see Dublin in a new light.
In a Dublin launderette, a young mother sits with a ball of baby-grows and bibs at her feet when a man in a rumpled Superman costume stumbles through the door.
Fractured family relationships form the heart of this debut collection, eleven short stories shot through with moments of sadness, longing, and resignation.
Gaffney’s uncompromisingly accurate depiction of Dublin’s underbelly in the noughties adds greatly to the story, but there is no nostalgia here, only an attempt to capture its dirty, dark charisma.
