Prosperity Drive

An outstanding collection…She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Irish Times

Mary Morrissy is a wonderful writer. These stories are entertaining and deft, so skilfully balanced and interwoven that when you begin to pick out the pattern it is a real moment of delight.

Hilary Mantel

Morrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle.

Imogen Lycett-Green, Daily Mail

Story by story [Morrissy] stitches together a hundred tiny plots, moving backwards and forwards across 60 years, and outwards to Italy, America, Australia and Vietnam… Morrissy proves herself a steady observer of the bleakness of everyday life, as well as when bleakness becomes catastrophe.

Hannah Rosefield, Observer

One of the best Irish books you’ll read this year.

Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post

There’s a psychological acuity and emotional understanding to Mary Morrissy’s stories, along with a barbed wit, that can only be achieved by the very best of writers… These 18 stories are so crammed with warmth, wit and insight that I wished for 18 more. Marvellous.

John Boland, Irish Independent

Makes for exquisite reading… We are left with the urge to go back and read the book again as so many layers of meaning and possible interpretations co exist inside the tome… Morrissy succeeds in creating a deeply moving work here, one that remains in the mind and the heart, a work of great subtlety and depth, a truly Irish book with a sweeping international feel, a work that asks the big questions and yet these questions are asked with the wisdom necessary to see that for some questions the answers are too daunting to do anything more than raise them and continue to raise them and lead readers and other writers to the doorway of moral choice.

Oran Ryan, Headstuff

Morrissy wafts pungent scents of our dirty old town at us in her collection of short stories… Morrissy is not without humour, sometimes offering laugh-out-loud observations. But the undercurrent throughout brings to mind Thoreau's line about most men (and women) living lives of quiet desperation. Her style, her intense moments of close clinical dissection, reminds me a little of John Banville. But she shows more compassion for her cast of characters, perhaps not unlike Alice Munro. All human life is indeed there in Prosperity Drive… It’s a magnificent read.

Anne Cunningham, Irish Independent

Demands that the reader immerse herself within its world… Much of the considerable power of Morrissy’s prose lies in her technique of dipping seamlessly in and out of temps perdu… Prosperity Drive’s epipahnic moments recall Joyce’s Dubliners… The compassion, immediacy, humour and delicacy with which Morrissy depicts their [her character’s] predicaments result in moments of profundity.

Claire Kilroy, Guardian

A master of language, she is also a keen observer of human nature… I simply loved these stories for their diversity… Sheer perfection throughout… She has the same forensic eye for detail; the same analytical touch, and sleight of language, allied with a quite astonishing ability to get inside her characters’ minds.

Sue Leonard, Irish Examiner

She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers… Her clear-eyed vision and her deep compassion, along with her lovely sense of the comic and her exceptional literary articulacy, make this an outstanding collection.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Irish Times

The author’s blend of beady-eyed humour and genuine empathy may remind readers of William Trevor.

Irish Independent, Book of the Year

Sam Miller's memoir Fathers is ostensibly about a family secret. But its true subject is a family silence… The book is about ways to be a father, but also, more generally, about ways to be a man, from the 1950s to now. Should you be an intellectual, and write letters full of irony and wit? How camp are you allowed to be, or how fearful of homoeroticism? Must you be good at manual labour? Where do you stand in relation to class or entitlement? Should you be more interested in football than you are?

William Leith, Evening Standard

Morrissy has been compared to Joyce and Chekov. She’s brilliant.

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Mary Morrissy’s persuasive stories sidle up to you quietly and before you know it have you wrapped up in their embrace… We meet people on the edge… in this resonant collection from an accomplished writer.

Donal O'Donoghue, RTE Guide