[Mary Lavin writes] most of the time about people who appear to be living, at first, in a state of inertia, in the lethargy of country life: then we notice that they are smoldering and what her stories contain is the smoldering of a hidden life. Her short stories are as dense as novels and we shall gradually apprehend the essence of complete life histories … and they make the novel form irrelevant. They give a real and not a fancied view of Irish domestic life and it combines the moving with the frightening. She excels in the full portraiture of power-loving women, downtrodden women, lonely women, bickering country girls, puzzled priests and seedy shopkeepers who might pass as country types first of all, but who soon reveal a human depth of endurance or emotional tumult in their secret lives. (p. x)

Many of [her] stories describe country deaths...