Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Story after story glints with the strange, hard magic of the North – a seam that Jan Carson has opened in her previous books and mines here to perfection. From soft-plays that swallow children to static caravans where girls are sent ahead of marriage, babies that float down the river in biscuit tins and the pruch for sale at garden centres, this is a Northern Ireland at once uncanny and familiar, ancient and modern, and a set of stories only Jan could have written. I adored them.

Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

Jan Carson's stories are by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, heartwarming - but always surprising. Quickly, While They Still Have Horses is a delight to read!

Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost to the Water

Jan Carson is one of the most original voices I’ve read in years. Her stories are fleet-footed and cunning and funny. They dare to look closely at what lurks beneath the quotidian surface of things, even if what is revealed will make you gasp. I am truly in awe of this collection.

Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage

Jan Carson is a born storyteller: her work is so imaginative, whimsical, mischievous and brave, but tender and curious too — you never know where she's going to take you next, so reading her is always an adventure. Exactly how it should be.

Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies

What an enormous pleasure it is to read Jan Carson. Each short story is masterful, brilliantly inventive and moving. Every page reveals the mark of an extraordinary original and gifted writer.

Karl Geary, author of Montpelier Parade

Jan Carson is an essential voice from the island of Ireland—an island that holds a wider variety of stories than can be accommodated within strict realism or naturalism. With great skill, assurance, and a tentacular imagination, and by getting the details right, Carson conveys highly complex subjectivities with powerful simplicity. There's something of the fable about each of these stories—troubling, timeless, wistful and wise.

Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter

Utterly captivating . . . [Jan Carson's] gift for language sings on every page . . . Fiercely beautiful writing laced with tenderness and wit, that at its heart speaks to the complexity and emotional temperature of a modern Northern Ireland, real and imagined, without losing sight of the past. Carson is a tremendously gifted writer and a master of the short story . . . Everyone should read it.

Olivia Fitzsimons, author of The Quiet Whispers Never Stop

These stories are pure magic, funny, sharp, heartbreaking, the short form at its absolute best. Jan Carson is a unique and very special writer, one of the greatest of the modern fabulists.

Donal Ryan, author of The Queen of Dirt Island

Short stories are difficult to make truly compelling but in Quickly, While They Still Have Horses, author Jan Carson does this effortlessly ... Her best yet.

IMAGE Magazine

[Jan Carson] is most definitely a free-thinking, trailblazing writer of well-observed, quirkily humorous fiction... This book is a wild but somehow, totally grounded read. Superb.

Sunday Independent

Throughout there is no doubt that the reader is in the presence of a formidable talent... Carson excels in offering an accumulation of detail, deftly painting portraits that convince even as they alarm... Long after the reader has closed the book, these tales linger in the mind: vivid, original and moving

Irish Times

These sixteen tales continue her instantly recognisable style, blending down-to-earth Ulster realism with surreal and fantastical elements, and bringing a fresh and unexpected atmosphere to what at first appear to be familiar settings and characters

Ballymena Guardian

A staggeringly brilliant new collection full of wonderful magical realism and utter, crushing everyday life. This may just be her best book so far.

Ricky O'Shea Bookclub, Irish Independent

This short story collection has themes of love, maturity, loss and parenthood in stories that are surprising, otherworldly, funny and heartfelt.

My Weekly

A voice to cherish; one which continues to weave a bright and colourful thread through the patchwork quilt of modern Irish writing

RTÉ, Book of the Week

All of the writing is enviably good.... A sparkling collection from one of the best writers on this island

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