Writing by Evelyn Conlon
Not the Same Sky
By 1848 famine has ravaged Ireland, and London remains undecided about what to do. A shortage of female labour in Australia offers a kind of solution and so, over the following two years, more than 4000 Irish girls are shipped across vast oceans to an unimaginable world in the new colony. On Sunday 28 October 1849, one of these ships, the Thomas Arbuthnot, sets sail from Plymouth with a cargo of girls under the care of Surgeon-superintendent Charles Strutt.
Skin of Dreams
This moving and disturbing novel confronts the experience of capital punishment… Skin of Dreams is also about the love between twins, and the loss of balance when that relationship is interrupted. Conlon subtly evokes the multiple worlds… from a drowning village in Ireland to a sojourn in Tennessee, from drinking nights in Dublin to Death Row, from an unresolved past to the fearful resolution of judicial murder.
Cutting the Night in Two
An important anthology which brings together thirty four short stories by Irish women writers. Some of them are well known, others less widely read. The collection is a powerful voice here made accessible in a compact and representative format; it is also key reading for students of literature, of Irish Studies and Women’ Studies.
Telling
Evelyn Conlon’s Telling includes nine completely new stories alongside ten of the best of her previously published tales. It is a triumphant demonstration of the continuing dynamism of one of Ireland’s most boldly original writers who deserves to be better known. Her characters experience at first hand the infuriating way life defies all our attempts to control it … bleak moments of self-discovery are counterpointed with stories of characteristically wry humor, with Conlon poking fun at self-appointed arbiters of taste and uncovering with deft irony the double standards that continue to bedevil dealings with men and women everywhere.
A Glassful of Letters
“This meticulously observant second novel from Conlon alternates between epistolary chapters and narratives in the first or third person … Conlon writes with sane, sober wit; her lucid prose is pithy without falling into epigrams”. –Publishers Weekly