Saints And Sinners, By Edna O'Brien

"Exile is in the mind and there is no cure for that," says Rafferty, an old Irish hobo in "Shovel Kings", the opening story of this elegiac collection.

Notions of home - real and flawed, imagined and Edenic - pulse through these stories, alongside its inverse - alienation, exile and spiritual homelessness.

Edna O'Brien's characters are, more often than not, suffering quiet yet implacable disappointments, in love, in family life and in factional communities, and it is testimony to O'Brien's supreme mastery of the short story format that so little happens on the surface, but beneath the walled-up exterior of the aggrieved mother, betrayed wife, raped child, the reader sees a chasm of pain, as they glimpse the tragedy of their lives.