Sean O'Faolain's Selected Stories are taken from collections published between 1947 and 1976. Every one of the 17 is a splendid example of the master's art of storytelling. It is quite remarkable how quickly the characters come to life and engage our sympathies; after one page of a story you feel you know them as well as if you had read 50 pages of a novel. O'Faolain has the gift of capturing in one phrase or sentence a look, a mood, a relationship: a faithless wife in bed with her lover tells him that her husband 'reminds me of an unemptied ashtray'. No other Irish writer has analysed so shrewdly and yet so charitably, and presented so entertainingly, the 'incongruities and contradictions' in his compatriots.

John Mellors, "Exuberant Lies," in The Listener (© British Broadcasting Corp. 1979; reprinted by permission of John Mellors), Vol. 99, No. 2556, April 20, 1979, p. 510.∗