An Arrow in Flight

She is, to come right out with it, magnificent

New York Times

She reminds us…what literature is about

Anthony Burgess

Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other

Sunday Times

She fascinates me more than any other of the Irish writers of my generation

Frank O’Connor

Mary Lavin is keeping the stronghold of the Irish story in first-rate repair

Spectator

Mary Lavin's prose has the simplicity and glow of time-polished wood

Sunday Times

Caustic and also lyrical, she sees Ireland, even in its most obscure aspects, with a visionary penetration

Seamus Deane

[Lavin] writes like a dream

New York Times Book Review

These sombre and skilfully written stories describe the tragic dilemmas with which character and nature confront humans everywhere

Washington Post

No one writing in Ireland today can penetrate more unerringly to the very essence of individual Irish character than Mary Lavin

New York Times

Mary Lavin’s ability to transcribe the physical world, especially the green damp world of rural Ireland where many of her stories are set, is as remarkable as ever

Joyce Carol Oates

No one writes better than she does about the constrictions on body and consciousness in Ireland, or describes their effects with more conviction

Observer

Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They're important work

Richard Ford 

Many of the well-crafted tales feel ahead of their time. This acute and uncompromising collection is a gift

Publisher's Weekly

Excellent short stories… Sympathetic, but unsentimental, she fearlessly delves into the hearts of widows, and the quiet upheavals of their lives

Daily Mail

Mary Lavin is a timeless master

Times Literary Supplement