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  • Published: 27 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448162024
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 20

Figure in a Photograph: A Short Story from 'Where Have You Been?'



Read a free short story from Joseph O’Connor's moving new collection, Where Have You Been?

‘Everyone should try childcare with a hangover. Once.’

Sean Hyland’s wife has left him in Dublin for the weekend, home alone with their infant daughter and teenage son. He has never felt more middle aged... Figure in a Photograph is a tender, funny and quietly poignant story that takes us to the heart of fatherhood and marriage, via skateboards, Jeremy Kyle and ectoplasms of snot.

This story is taken from Where Have You Been?, award-winning novelist Joseph O'Connor's first collection of short stories in more than twenty years.

Ranging from urgently contemporary London and Dublin to New York's Lower East Side in the nineteenth century, from dark comedy to poignancy, from the wryly provocative to the quietly beautiful, Where Have You Been? offers a gathering of dreamers and lost souls who contend with the confusions of living.

An entertaining and life-affirming read from the internationally acclaimed author of Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls and Ghost Light.

The full physical and digital editions will be available on 4th October 2012.

  • Published: 27 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448162024
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 20

About the author

Joseph O'Connor

Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin. His books include eight previous novels: Cowboys and Indians (Whitbread Prize shortlist), Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, Star of the Sea (American Library Association Award, Irish Post Award for Fiction, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European novel of the year), Redemption Falls, Ghost Light (Dublin One City One Book Novel 2011) and The Thrill of it All. His fiction has been translated into forty languages. He received the 2012 Irish PEN Award for outstanding achievement in literature and in 2014 he was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

www.josephoconnorauthor.com

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Praise for Figure in a Photograph: A Short Story from 'Where Have You Been?'

Ireland's greatest storyteller

Sunday Independent

A writer who reveals the power of the short story to speak for our time

Irish Times

A masterclass in versatility... Atmospheric vignettes bring O’Connor’s prose close to poetry... His terrific ear for idiomatic speech makes dialogue sizzle off the page... This outstanding collection exhibits the continuing vitality of the great Irish tradition of richly concise, crisply written stories that Joyce’s work began

Sunday Times

O’Connor’s first collection of short stories for 20 years reasserts a mastery of the form... An exhilarating array of sharp dialogue and biting one-liners... A fine compassionate collection

Irish Independent