An Arrow in Flight

Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight.
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TÓIBÍN
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Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin's work is largely unpublished and overlooked.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 TOÍBÍN
'She is, to come right out with it, magnificent' New York Times
'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
'Lavin writes like a dream' New York Times Book Review

Mary Lavin (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.
Colm Toibin (Introducer)
Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of two novels, The South, which won The Irish Times/Aer Lingus Prize, and The Heather Blazing, which won the Encore Prize for the best second novel published in Britain in 1992, as well as two travel books, Homage to Barcelona and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. He lives in Dublin.