Description
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 a man who cut ahead of her in a line. Two nice people report that a child is being 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 surprising revelations—Old Romantics is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent. Slippery, flawed, and acute, Armstrong’s narrator navigates a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility with piercing insight into the trials and tribulations of attempting to be human while female.
Praise for Old Romantics
“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
“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
