Sean O'Faolain writes proper stories, and most of them meet his excellent criterion: 'As I see it, a Short Story, if it is a good story, is like a child's kite, a small wonder, a brief, bright moment.'

Many of them are about the cruelties and beauties of memory. He sees growing up as a painful realisation that the world is an illusion and suggests, paradoxically but sensibly, that our solace must be to embrace illusion, which 'saves us from having to admit that beauty and goodness exist here only for as long as we create and nourish them by the force of our dreams.' This Jesuitical twist is typical: the stories [in The Collected Stories of Sean O'Faolain: Volume Two] are about Ireland, bogs, pubs, IRA and all, and through them runs the skein of the Roman faith. There are stories about theological jokes, pilgrimage...