Short Stories: Life, as the introduction to this collection of new stories points out, can change in an instant.
For the people in the coastal regions of Asia that were hit by the tsunami on December 26th last, that instant was unreal, terrifying and utterly devastating. Of all the fund-raising projects that have come to fruition since then, this little book must be one of the most appealing. Buy it, and every cent of the €10 cover charge finds its way into the coffers of Goal. Open it, and you'll find a snapshot of young Irish romance fiction writing as it currently is - as apparently effortless as it is effortlessly entertaining.
All the big names are involved: Maeve Binchy, Cecelia Ahern, Patricia Scanlan, Sheila O'Flanagan, Deirdre Purcell, Clare Boylan, Martina Devlin. The topics are many and - considering the writers were all asked to write on the same theme, "moments of change" - surprisingly varied. A hit man stalks his victim. An angry wife confronts the husband who left her for another man. A young graduate student almost drowns when her house is flooded. A man offers to buy his best friend's wife. The narrative tone, meanwhile, is a study in contrasts. Romance fiction is supposed to be full of bright young creatures drinking and laughing and dressing up - isn't it? - but though there are plenty of them here, Moments also has its share of characters who are overwhelmed by sorrow and despair.
Some of the narrative voices are very young, some not so young. Denise Deegan's Checkout Girl is narrated by an 83-year-old woman who has just died, but hasn't lost her sense of humour: "It's most unsettling to find myself being whisked back to a supermarket at a time like this. I was planning on heaven . . ." Several offer opening sentences to die for. "I am losing my hair," is how Karen Gillece begins the aptly-titled Hair, while in Breaking and Entering Julie Parsons goes for the jugular: "I'm not sure when I first began to hate my husband."
These stories probably won't change your life, but they may just make you cry (Helena Close's Geronimo does a pretty good job of capturing, in just seven and a half pages, a mother's grief at the death of her son) and they'll almost certainly make you laugh (try Cathy Kelly's sparkling Pink Lady, or Emma Donoghue's wry Expecting - or how about Laura Froom's The Cycle, with its wicked take on the old cliché, "that time of the month"?). Which is good enough - for the moment.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
Moments: Irish Women Writers In Aid Of The Tsunami Victims. Edited by Ciara Considine Clé, 352 pp. €10
