In the 21 stories that compose this scintillating collection, Maeve Brennan writes about the daily lives of three Dublin families. Brennan turns her anatomist's eye to the resentment, rivalry, and hatred that teem beneath the surface of family life - always doing so, however, with an attention to detail that makes these unsparing stories luminous and exquisite. Brennan's subjects are ordinary people worn down by life, its little humiliations; yet they are also dreamers, defiantly hopeful of one day stepping beyond the narrow confines of the situation in which, unaccountably, they have found themselves. These stories ache; pitting imagination against circumstance, they are at once claustrophobic and expansive. With a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Claire-Louise Bennett, these stories reveal Maeve Brennan to be one of the most innovative and important writers of the 20th century.