When you call a book A Rose in the Heart you are taking a risk, perhaps a brave one; when you subtitle the same book "Love Stories," you may be approaching the territory of the sentimental with a foolhardy lack of regard. It is Edna O'Brien's particular genius to write about subjects which often fall to poor stylists or sloppy thinkers, because the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. No one else writing today achieves what O'Brien does: the exploration of passionate subjects, and a deftness and precision of language accessible in our age most often to the chiefly cerebral, or to the detached.

Her real theme is loss and its effects: diminishment, revenge, reversal, cure. But she is never sentimental because she is never vague. Sentimentality is largely a failure of eyesight…. The lilt of her prose is an Irish legacy...