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 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
“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 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
