Leland Bardwell is one of the senior figures of Irish writing: a novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer whose fiction has appeared on bestseller lists abroad and is accorded classic status at home. Bardwell's keen-eyed, unflinching short stories, were originally published in 1987, and deal with a range of topics of considerable relevance to readers in our own difficult times. As fresh and relevant as when they first appeared, these stories, like Bardwell's poetry, record what Eilean Ni Chuilleanain has called "the shocks of our time, the private impacts and the historic changes."