With the publication of her comic debut novel No Mate for the Magpie in 1985, Frances Molloy took the world of Irish letters by storm. But hardly had she arrived than she had gone. Her tragic death in 1991 at the age of 44 left a horrible void in the lives of those who loved her, and robbed the reading public of a startlingly original talent.

This collection is a powerful reminder of what has been lost. Her stories are, by turns, humorous, affectionate and almost unbearably brutal. One minute she has her readers on the rack, listening to a husband blithely justify driving his wife to suicide, the next she is telling us about a family's encounter with a talking donkey in the Sperrins. What unifies the collection is Molloy's skill as a storyteller, and the uncanny rapport she felt for the wronged, the weak and the damaged - an insider's understanding which enabled her to render their experiences in fiction in a totally compelling way.

With an introduction to the stories by Ruth Carr, and an introduction to the author by Gerard Brady.