Yesterday's Weather
Stories
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, and the Washington Post Book World.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering and Actress, this is a collection of sharp, unpredictable short fiction about people struggling to connect in an increasingly disconnected world.
Yesterday’s Weather shows us a rapidly changing Ireland, a land of family and tradition, but also, increasingly, of organic radicchio, cruise-ship vacations, and casual betrayals. An artisan farmer seethes at the patronage of a former Catholic-school classmate, now a successful restaurateur; a bride cheats on her rich husband with an old college friend—a madman who refuses his pills, disappears for weeks on end, and plays the piano like a dream. These and other stories make up a volume that is “astonishing: moving, emotionally accurate, sly, and laugh-out-loud funny” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
“A dazzling collection.” —Time Out
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this overstuffed collection from Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering), the gems are overshadowed by the sheer number of stories (there are 31). Enright's talent lies in her ability to tweak an ordinary situation and create something that is at once unique and universal: two wives coming to different conclusions about their husbands' infidelities in "Until the Girl Died" and "The Portable Virgin," an examination of elevator and pregnancy etiquette in "Shaft" or the permutations of sexual desire in "Revenge." Other standouts such as "Little Sister" and "Felix" resonate because of their tight focus. In the former, the narrator pieces together her dead sister's life and realizes "It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn't." In "Felix," Enright riffs on Lolita and creates an endearing and repulsive middle-aged woman narrator who has an affair with a neighborhood boy. But too often Enright's characters more often than not female, first-person narrators bleed into one another until their stories become jumbled in the reader's mind, as another unhappy wife or mother laments her situation.
