After a Dance

To call [these stories] characterful is to undersell these Technicolor prose screams, these screeching narrative sprints, this filthy feast of stories. Think Irvine Welsh meets Edna O’Brien … pure, delicious naughty fun. * The Times *
These are some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I’ve read in a long time. – Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
A storytelling genius before her time * The Irish Times *
Wickedly funny, stylishly written, I relished each and every one of these stories * Patrick McCabe, author of The Butcher Boy *
Every O’Connor story is a performance, a live fight with time and decay, disgust and the human body. She wrote intensely from her time and place; to read her now is to be catapulted back to 1990s London. Yet the voice, the themes are more relevant than ever. No wonder she was so preoccupied with temporality: she was before her time. – Martina Evans * The Irish Times *
’[Bridget O’Connor] was an incredible short story writer … hilarious, tragic, shuddering – Laura Hackett * The Times *
‘Mostly brief, sometimes brutal, always funny … a master of the [short story]. The results are both vivacious and vicious. But even at their most painful, they sing * The Herald *
Bridget O’Connor creates unforgettable voices … Sad, funny, disturbing, the tales in After a Dance are odd, and oddly luminous * Times Literary Supplement *
These stories have more electricity in them than many novels * Guardian *
In this new collection her most accomplished and most devastating stories lie side by side. O’Connor writes of everyday characters so pitiful they are ridiculous, so awful they become lovable … The language is unexpected and the twists are often absurd. Reading O’Connor is always a delight * New Statesman *

Bridget O’Connor was born in London in 1961, and began her career as a writer whilst working in a building-site canteen. In her spare moments she penned darkly comic and excruciatingly well-observed short stories, one of which, ‘Harp’, won the 1991 Time Out short story prize. Two collections followed, Here Comes John (1993) and Tell Her You Love Her (1997). In 2001 her stage play The Flags was performed at the Manchester Royal Exchange before being produced in Liverpool, Dublin, Belfast, Slovenia, and Australia. Like so much of her writing, it was praised as much for being ‘sharp and gritty’ as for its ‘sublimely drawn’ characters and situations. As a screenwriter, Bridget often worked with her husband, Peter Straughan, and their final screenplay together was the Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. She once called herself a happy pessimist, and shining humour into dark corners was a speciality in her work and elsewhere. Bridget died in 2010, and was survived by Peter and their daughter Constance.

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