John Montague can sketch a painfully vivid scene with a few swift strokes; never a word is wasted in these lean, muscular pieces which, both stylistically and thematically, place him firmly in the premier division of Irish story-tellers. He has set stories in just about every milieu from Florence to Mexico, but he is at his devastating best among the dripping hedges and rain-soaked streets of this enchanted isle, and his people - whether they be drunken farmers, cynical civil servants or gawky teenagers - leap off the page and into the heart with a clumsy grace that is, at times, almost shockingly moving.
By Arminta Wallace