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  • Published: 30 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529942699
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Children's Children





A reissue of the debut short story collection from the multi-award-winning author of The Raptures, with a new bonus story

Read the debut short story collection from the multi-award-winning author of The Raptures, now updated with a new bonus story.

'Jan Carson is a born storyteller' Lisa McInerney

A floating six-year-old tethered to the backyard fence; two siblings watching their parents argue inside a greenhouse; a human statue who’s lost the ability to move; a support group for the haunted: the characters in Children’s Children are all falling apart in their own peculiar ways.

Told in Jan Carson’s distinctive voice, her debut short story collection contains absurdist, darkly humorous and heartbreaking stories which explore the concept of legacy, and the impact of one generation upon the next.

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PRAISE FOR JAN CARSON:

'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 Heart, Be at Peace

'Story after story glints with the strange, hard magic of the North . . . I adored them.' LUCY CALDWELL, author of These Days

'Jan Carson's stories are by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, heartwarming - but always surprising' ERIC NGUYEN, author of Things We Lost to the Water

'Jan Carson is one of the most original voices I’ve read in years . . . 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

  • Published: 30 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529942699
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Jan Carson

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator 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 a flash fiction anthology, Postcard Stories (2017). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. In 2016 she won the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition and was shortlisted for the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. She specializes in running arts projects and events with older people, especially those living with dementia. The Fire Starters is her second novel.

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