THE COAST ROAD
It’s 1994 in County Donegal, Ireland, and everyone is talking about Colette Crowley – the writer, the bohemian, the woman who left her husband and sons to pursue a relationship with a married man in Dublin. But now Colette is back, and nobody knows why. Returning to the community to try and reclaim her old life, Colette quickly learns that they are unwilling to give it back to her.
Alan Murrin is an Irish fiction writer.‘The Coast Road’ is his debut novel, but he has gained critical acclaim through his short stories. In 2021 he was the winner of the Bournemouth Writing Prize for his short story ‘The Wake’, which went on to be shortlisted for short story of the year at the Irish Book Awards and was published in the collection ‘Waves of Change’. In 2023 he was awarded an Irish Arts Council Next Generation Award. He is a graduate of the prose fiction masters at the University of East Anglia. His work was featured as part of the New Irish Writing series in the Irish Independent.
OPENINGS
From a passionate affair in Blitz-era London, to a highly charged Christmas party in Belfast, to a trip to Marrakech which could form a new family, the thirteen striking stories of ‘Openings’ pulse with possibility and illuminate those fleeting but recognisable moments of heartbreak and hope that can change the course of a life.
Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two previous collections of short stories:’Multitudes’ and ‘Intimacies’. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize – for her novel ‘The Meeting Point’ – and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is the winner of the 2022 E. M. Forster Award. Lucy 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.’
HEY, ZOEY
Imagine discovering an animatronic sex doll hidden in the garage. What would you do? Dolores initially does nothing. She assumes the doll belongs to her husband, David, and their relationship is already strained. They’re not young, they’re not old; they have no children, they keep up with the markers of being middle class and Dolores is well versed in keeping men’s secrets.
Sarah Crossan grew up in Dublin and emigrated to the U.K. when she was six years old, later studying at The University of Warwick and The University of Cambridge. Sarah’s novels ‘The Weight of Water’, ‘Apple’ and ‘Rain’ were twice shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the CBI Book of the Year and in 2016, Sarah won the CILIP Carnegie Medal and CBI Book of the Year as well as the YA Book Prize, the CLiPPA Poetry Award, and many other awards for her novel, ‘One’, a novel in verse about a set of conjoined twins. Sarah’s novels have been translated into more than twenty languages and her debut, ‘The Weight of Water’, has been adapted for the stage four times. Several of her books have been optioned for film and TV.
