Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas and one previous collection of short stories, Multitudes. She has twice been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Canada and Europe) and the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Award. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various – New Irish Short Stories.

by the same author

fiction

where they were missed

the meeting point

all the beggars riding

multitudes

drama

leaves

notes to future self

three sisters (after Anton Chekhov)

Copyright

First published in 2021
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA

This ebook edition first published in 2021

The right of Lucy Caldwell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover Design by Jack Smyth

‘Like This’ was commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 (October 2018); ‘Mayday’ was published in The Glass Shore, ed. Sinéad Gleeson (New Island, 2016); ‘Night Waking’ was published in Still Worlds Turning, ed. Emma Warnock (No Alibis Press, 2019); ‘The Children’ was published in Resist, ed. Ra Page (Comma Press, 2019) and shortlisted for the 2019 BBC National Short Story Award.

‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’ from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

‘Knowing and Learning’ from Babies and their Mothers by Donald Winnicott, copyright © 1987 by Donald Winnicott. Used by permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd., on behalf of The Winnicott Trust CIO 1174533.

‘Openness’, from Miracle Fair by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak.
Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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ISBN 978–0–571–35376–7