Let's Dance by Lucy Sweeney Byrne
190 pages
Paperback
3 October 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7393979-7-5
I’ve seen how the clouds look when viewed from above, stretched pink and gold-tinged for miles and miles and miles. I’ve seen a single cumulus cloud against a blue sky from my seat outside a café below, thrumming still in upness. I’ve seen the making of The Matrix bonus feature on the DVD, Keanu Reeves being lifted in his harness, Harvey Weinstein smiling and slapping backs on his way to somewhere else. I’ve seen dirty clothes pile up in a laundry basket, and hairs in the drain. I’ve seen smoke rise from the bonnet of my car.
In her latest collection of dark, hilarious and provocative short stories, Lucy Sweeney Byrne explores women on the brink – of love, of joy, of disaster – with her signature wit, insight and daring.
A newlywed grapples with the chasm that has opened up between her and her husband on the subject of children. A young mother tries to eke out a life for her family on an island named for a dead man, unaware of the psychic toll that is taken on her by the land and sea. And a woman at a drug-fuelled house party ruminates on the dark past she shares with one of the guests.
In Let’s Dance, Lucy Sweeney Byrne, in her signature hypnotic prose, explores subjects such as physicality, identity and disillusionment. Utilising forms ranging from flash fiction to novella, Let’s Dance is a glittering display of fiction’s ability to probe, startle and entertain.
About the Author
Lucy Sweeney Byrne is the author of the short story collection Paris Syndrome (2019, Banshee Press), met with critical acclaim and shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Edge Hill Prize, the Kate O’Brien Award, the Butler Literary Award, and the John McGahern Prize. Lucy’s short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Southword, AGNI, Litro, Grist, 3:AM magazine, and other literary outlets. She also writes book reviews for The Irish Times.
Author photo by David Fagelman
Media
Rick O’Shea: how a terrorism trial, top-notch short stories and circling the Earth helped while away a week in the woods | Irish Independent | 9 November 2024
Review: Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s Let’s Dance is a witty, dark collection of short stories | Irish Independent | 18 October 2024
Review: Let’s Dance – ever constricting circles in a masterful collection | Books Ireland | 14 October 2024
Review: Cocaine, consumerism and profound loneliness | The Irish Times | 5 October 2024
Lucy Sweeney Byrne: I never used to think of myself as resilient | The Irish Times | 2 October 2024
‘Meantimes’ by Lucy Sweeney Byrne | The Stinging Fly | 12 September 2024
Praise for Let’s Dance
“These stories of reflection and resolve are all you’d ever want in a collection. Its crises are acute, and the thoughts and actions of its characters will cut to the heart.”
“Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s stories are like songs that make you sit up and listen till the last note. An album full of hits, Let’s Dance is sweet and catchy, tender and acid, salty and wicked — and always wonderfully readable.”
“I love Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s precise, scurrying prose … I don’t know how she does what she does.”
“Hers is a voice so strong, she makes the rest of us sound timid.”
“In her gripping formal efforts to dilate ‘a passing something before the nothing’s void’, in fierce commitment to her subjects of time and the body, abjection and freedom, Lucy Sweeney Byrne is our Irish Duras while also wholly, electrifyingly, her own artist in every step of Let’s Dance.”
“Let’s Dance is a soul-stirring collection, as Lucy Sweeney Byrne carves women’s simmering rage on the page with tender, hypnotic prose. Let’s Dance is a modern masterpiece of the short story form. This collection is a triumph that cements Sweeney Byrne as among the best in contemporary Irish literature.”