Looking forward to looking back

This is the cover of my new collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision, from The Lilliput Press – https://www.lilliputpress.ie – due to be published in March.

The theme of the stories is hindsight. The characters revisit their pasts and grapple with late-life perspectives. It’s a portrait of a generation of women and men moving into the third age with a mixture of apprehension, longing and regret. So it’s more Mature People than Normal People.

The art work is by designer Adrian Robb – https://www.adrianzdesign.com/. The predominant use of blue might be a clue to the tone of the collection – hindsight tends to be melancholic. But there’s some grim humour here too and a bit of hilarity. Late middle-aged regret isn’t all downbeat and there are – whisper it! – some happy endings.

The title is double-edged. As the collection progresses, the pandemic sneaks into the narratives – i.e. the first year of the Covid crisis, when so much was unclear because we were so closely up against it.

Readers may not want to be reminded of a vision of the world in 2020, but for a writer of contemporary fiction, it would seem like wilful blindness not to acknowledge the Covid epidemic. Particularly since, from this distance, we are seeing the long-reaching, personal and societal costs of it.

Like the elephant in the room, it hasn’t gone away, you know.

Twenty-Twenty Vision is published by The Lilliput Press, March 20, 2025.