Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Jan Carson is a born storyteller: her work is so imaginative, whimsical, mischievous and brave, but tender and curious too — you never know where she’s going to take you next, so reading her is always an adventure. Exactly how it should be. * Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies *These stories are pure magic, funny, sharp, heartbreaking, the short form at its absolute best. Jan Carson is a unique and very special writer, one of the greatest of the modern fabulists. * Donal Ryan, author of The Queen of Dirt Island *Story after story glints with the strange, hard magic of the North – a seam that Jan Carson has opened in her previous books and mines here to perfection. From soft-plays that swallow children to static caravans where girls are sent ahead of marriage, babies that float down the river in biscuit tins and the pruch for sale at garden centres, this is a Northern Ireland at once uncanny and familiar, ancient and modern, and a set of stories only Jan could have written. I adored them. * Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days *Jan Carson’s stories are by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, heartwarming - but always surprising. Quickly, While They Still Have Horses is a delight to read! * Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost to the Water *Jan Carson is one of the most original voices I’ve read in years. Her stories are fleet-footed and cunning and funny. They dare to look closely at what lurks beneath the quotidian surface of things, even if what is revealed will make you gasp. I am truly in awe of this collection. * Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage *What an enormous pleasure it is to read Jan Carson. Each short story is masterful, brilliantly inventive and moving. Every page reveals the mark of an extraordinary original and gifted writer. * Karl Geary, author of Montpelier Parade *Jan Carson is an essential voice from the island of Ireland—an island that holds a wider variety of stories than can be accommodated within strict realism or naturalism. With great skill, assurance, and a tentacular imagination, and by getting the details right, Carson conveys highly complex subjectivities with powerful simplicity. There’s something of the fable about each of these stories—troubling, timeless, wistful and wise. * Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter *Utterly captivating … [Jan Carson’s] gift for language sings on every page … Fiercely beautiful writing laced with tenderness and wit, that at its heart speaks to the complexity and emotional temperature of a modern Northern Ireland, real and imagined, without losing sight of the past. Carson is a tremendously gifted writer and a master of the short story … Everyone should read it. * Olivia Fitzsimons, author of The Quiet Whispers Never Stop *Short stories are difficult to make truly compelling but in Quickly, While They Still Have Horses, author Jan Carson does this effortlessly … Her best yet. * IMAGE Magazine *[Jan Carson] is most definitely a free-thinking, trailblazing writer of well-observed, quirkily humorous fiction… This book is a wild but somehow, totally grounded read. Superb. * Sunday Independent *

Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim, followed by a short-story collection, Children’s Children (2016), and two flash fiction anthologies, Postcard Stories (2017) and Postcard Stories 2 (2020). Her second novel, The Fire Starters (2019), won the EU Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Novel of the Year Award and her third novel, The Raptures (2022) was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her most recent short story collection, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses, was published in 2024. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She has won the Harper’s Bazaar short-story competition and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, the An Post Irish Short Story of the Year, and the Sean Faolain Short Story Prize.

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