Short Stories
Below you will find the short story volumes:
Azure Forest
It was six. Aodh sipped his tea. The darkness had truly descended, and he had no idea where his family could be. The echo of the Angelus made the baroque mother and infant quiver on the television screen. It was chilly, but Aodh did not light the fire. The news came on. There had been a shooting in the North – one man killed, another injured. Aodh pursed his lips and stared into the newsreader’s eyes, and she, nonplussed, stared back.
Eleven of the stories in this first volume have been rated in short story competitions in Ireland and the UK. The themes range from an adolescent boy’s mental dissolution, to a speculative fiction take on the Northern Ireland conflict. The author deftly tackles his characters’ struggles. His hammer falls lightly, enabling his creations to reach their own judgement of themselves.
Prayer for the Cancelled
Raquel sends Victor on a mission to find a premises for a riverside party. He takes the U3 across town, and reads a novel on his e-reader until the train exits the tunnel before Gleisdreieck station and the railway continues its journey above the Kreuzberg streets. He looks up at the sky for a time. Then just as he returns to his novel, he sees Sally sitting opposite him. She looks at him like he is vaguely familiar: a man of her ethnicity, a man who is travelling the same train, who she will never know beyond these tiny notes taken in her head, that will quickly be erased.
Another proffering from the pen, or rather keyboard of Aongus Murtagh. The theme of judgement is ever-present. In the eponymous story, a writer sets off to meet the group who has cancelled him. Beyond the Irish settings, the reader is also guided through Berlin’s special kind of darkness. Here, the subject areas range from an exile’s encounter with his torturer, to an ex-squatter’s need to purge his past through violence.