About this item
Highlights
- Shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award - Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Sunday Independent Newcomer of the YearLike Dubliners, if Dubliners were "Cat Person" as a feminist mock-epic about a writer's coming of age--and every Dubliner was named Margaret.A woman pursues the man who cut ahead of her in line.
- About the Author: Maggie Armstrong's work has appeared in the Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, and elsewhere.
- 272 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
"A woman pursues the man who cut ahead of her in line. Two nice people report that a child has been left unsupervised at a local beach. Romances, old and new, shift and sour. Following Maggie Armstrong's intrepid hero, Margaret, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date, and on into midlife and its attendant disillusionment and revelations, Old Romantics is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent. Endearingly flawed and perilously honest, Armstrong's characters navigate a world of awkward ex n and latent hostility with piercing insight and indelible wit."--Book Synopsis
Shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award - Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year
Like Dubliners, if Dubliners were "Cat Person" as a feminist mock-epic about a writer's coming of age--and every Dubliner was named Margaret.
A woman pursues the man who cut ahead of her in line. Two nice people report that a child has been left unsupervised at a local beach. Romances, old and new, shift and sour. Following Maggie Armstrong's intrepid hero, Margaret, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date, and on into midlife and its attendant disillusionment and revelations, Old Romantics is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent. Endearingly flawed and perilously honest, Armstrong's characters navigate a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility with piercing insight and indelible wit.
Review Quotes
Praise for Old Romantics
"The stories in Old Romantics are tender, heartsick, crisp and haunting. They will stay with you."
--Colin Barrett, Booker Prize-nominated author of Wild Houses
"Reading it left me vacillating between almost spitting out my coffee to laugh and feeling sunken and eviscerated at the recognition of Margaret's many personal, professional, and romantic disappointments and the scalpel-like precision with which Armstrong renders them page after page."
--Tadhg Hoey, Brooklyn Rail
"[Old Romantics] displays first-person prose of stunningly high quality and a belief in language at once arresting and propellant . . . As Margaret's arc moves along, from bad dates in worse apartments to apocalyptic vacations to the United States, through pregnancy scares and miscarriage scares and thoughts of abortion to stepdaughters and dying wives of lovers, Old Romantics manages to be both moving and irreverent, entertaining and disarming, concrete and expansive. It contains, we might say, a novel of multitudes."
--D.W. White, West Trade Review
"An impressive linked collection . . . funny and heartbreaking . . . as each increasingly rewarding entry advances the overarching narrative. Readers will be grateful to inhabit Margaret's singular world."
--Publishers Weekly
"As for the prose, you could bathe in it. The details, the clever turns of phrase. A ticking clock is 'strict, censorious, like a clacking tongue'. A heart bangs 'like a broken toy.'"
--Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times
"The collection builds to four final stories with power, insight and compassion for human frailty."
--Martina Devlin, Irish Independent
"An audacious debut."
--Irish Times
"Readers of Old Romantics will be swept up in the verve of Armstrong's storytelling, but the deeper purpose of the humour, as with all good comedic writing, is that of connection, of recognition: this crazy thing called life, tell me you feel it too? The more we laugh, the closer we are to tears. Old Romantics is a collection big on feeling, on living, romanticism with a capital R."
--Sarah Gilmartin, The Stinging Fly
"Old Romantics is a dazzling snapshot of Dublin in the early 21st century, full of wry social observation. This book deserves a broad readership. It's one for your friend, or your sister, or your (favourite) daughter-in-law . . . it will appeal to anyone who likes clever, modern, writing about womanhood."
--Aingeala Flannery, Irish Independent
"Old Romantics is somehow both elegant and fiery. Maggie Armstrong's Dublin is full of surprises. An excellent debut."
--Nicole Flattery
"Exquisite and inventive prose conjures simmering menace along with sardonic comedy and razor-sharp self-awareness in this mesmerising collection."
--Sophie White
"Funny and awkward and honest and perceptive and shrewd . . . a very exciting new voice in Irish fiction."
--Louise O'Neill
About the Author
Maggie Armstrong's work has appeared in the Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, and elsewhere. She lives in Dublin. Old Romantics is her debut.