Prosperity Drive

The gifted Irish writer returns with a stunning book of linked stories 'A wonderful writer' Hilary Mantel All of life is laid bare in Prosperity Drive. A woman falls and remembers a moment decades earlier that changed the course of her life. A failed priest teaches children to swim at the YMCA. A teenage girl takes a spanner to the car of the young man who has driven her home. A honeymoon in Venice goes disastrously wrong. A man is reunited with his first love in an airport departure lounge. All of the characters begin their journeys on Prosperity Drive, appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory in this mesmerising book.

About the Author :
Mary Morrissy has published three novels - Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey - and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993). She has won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Literary Foundation Award and currently teaches at University College Cork.

Review :
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. 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. Morrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle. 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. One of the best Irish books you’ll read this year. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.