Bríd Brennan

"Set in an un-named city but with an astonishing, breath-shorteningly palpable sense of time and place Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. The story of inaction with enormous consequences and decisions that are never made, but for which people are judged and punished. Middle sister is our protagonist. She is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her nearly-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark...

"Brilliant, dark stories of women's lives by "a very major talent" (Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times) In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by deprivation-material, emotional, sexual-but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate. An expectant...

Joseph Hilditch, an eccentric chef, befriends a young woman, Felicia, who has come to town searching for her boyfriend. She is attracted to the seemingly harmless and extremely helpful Hilditch, trusting him and entering his life, only to discover too late that she is not the first woman that he has taken in.