Intimacies - by Lucy Caldwell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Eleven perfect stories" (Irish Independent) that chart the steps and missteps of young women trying to find their place in the world, including the winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award.

"Precise and beautifully controlled fictions but with strange, wild energies pulsing along just beneath the surface. A tremendous collection." --Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter

From a Belfast student ordering illegal drugs online to end an unwanted pregnancy to a young mother's brush with mortality; from a Christmas Eve walking the city centre streets when everything seems possible, to a night flight from Canada which could change a life irrevocably, these are stories of love, loss and exile, of new beginnings and lives lived away from "home".

Taking in, too, the lives of other women who could be guiding lights - from Monica Lewinsky to Caroline Norton to Sinéad O'Connor - Intimacies offers keenly felt and subtly revealing insights into the heartbreak and hope of young motherhood and modern life.

Review Quotes

"Precise and beautifully controlled fictions but with strange, wild energies pulsing along just beneath the surface. A tremendous collection." --Kevin Barry

"Smart, nuanced and sometimes heart-stopping." --Anne Enright

"Outstanding." --Guardian

"Eleven perfect stories." --Irish Independent

"Glorious."--The Times

"My FAVE collection ever." --Pandora Sykes

"Embedded in these stories are exquisite, often moving descriptions where everyday moments mix with the monumental."--Financial Times

"Heart-stoppingly good. Lucy Caldwell is a masterful writer." --Lisa McGee, writer of Derry Girls

"Caldwell explores what it means to be a woman with devastating honesty, warmth and compassion. She manages to get underneath the skin of her characters exploring situations which are unique, yet heartbreakingly familiar." --Jan Carson

"An astute observer of the mundane, Caldwell finds poetry - and even a kind of religiosity - in the quotidian rituals of domesticity."--Irish Times

"A memorable and unmissable book from one of Ireland's most essential writers." --Sunday Times

About the Author

Born in Belfast in 1981, Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three previous collections of short stories. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she was also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019, and has won the E. M. Forster Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Walter Scott Prize among others.