© Ambo/Anthos Publishers, 2013
Where Have You Been? is Joseph O'Connor's first collection of short stories in more than twenty years. Its opening story, "Two Little Clouds", is a nod in the direction of Joyce's "A Little Cloud" in Dubliners, but with an ironic twist. O'Connor's character Eddie Virago – anti-hero of his 1991 début novel, Cowboys and Indians – here returns to Dublin, bragging about his life in London and blithely unaware that the property boom he plans to exploit is just a few months away from imploding. The caustic humour of this story is replaced by a melancholic tone in stories like "Death of a Civil Servant", the countdown to a suicide set in the same decade, and "October-coloured Weather", which captures the encounter in a hotel bar between a woman who has just been told she is fatally ill with an American tour guide of Irish-Jewish extraction. "The Wexford Girl" displays an intense and unsentimental awareness of loneliness through the relationship between a loving young boy and his beleaguered father, while the title story, a novella, concludes the collection with an exploration of an unfolding relationship between a man and a woman, each haunted by the demons of their past.
Harvill Secker 2012
Translated into: Dutch, French
Carole Blake
Blake Friedmann Literary Agency Ltd.
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Email: carole@blakefriedmann.co.uk
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