Paris Syndrome by Lucy Sweeney Byrne
256 pages
Mass market paperback
1 August 2021
ISBN: 978-1-8383126-2-6
Shortlisted:
Edge Hill Prize 2020
Kate O'Brien Award 2020
Butler Literary Award 2020
John McGahern Annual Book Prize 2019
Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer 2020
I went to visit the grave of de Beauvoir and Sartre and felt as though, when I saw it, I would be truly moved. It was a sunny day in September – hot with a soft breeze, pleasantly sweaty, in the quiet scented air of Paris on a weekday afternoon. We were lightly hungover, in that drowsy warm way, where everything blurs a little, the whole day vignetting in memory even as we lived it.
In these eleven stories, debut author Lucy Sweeney Byrne invites us to experience travelling the world alone as a young woman, with all its attendant pleasures and dangers.
The staff of a boat moored in Brooklyn rebel against their tyrannical boss. A drifting writer house-sits in the wilds of Donegal in the midst of a health scare. In a Texas dive bar, two former lovers try to salvage a friendship from their intense connection. And in Mexico, a frustrated artist navigates a city both dangerous and alluring.
Whether set in New York, Oaxaca, Havana or back home in Dublin, the result is by turns sharp, fearless and heartbreaking. Laced with biting humour and devastating observations, Paris Syndrome introduces a unique literary talent.
About the Author
Lucy Sweeney Byrne is a writer of short stories, essays and poetry. Her work has appeared in Banshee, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Grist, and the anthology Stinging Fly Stories (2018). From Greystones, Co. Wicklow, she currently lives in Northumberland.
Media
Backlist Beauties: Paris Syndrome by Lucy Sweeney Byrne | Books Ireland | 4 August 2021
Best debuts of 2019: despite perennial difficulties, talent has emerged | The Irish Times | 11 December 2019
Paris Syndrome reviewed by Emily S. Cooper | The Stinging Fly | 30 September 2019
Paris Syndrome reviewed by Orlagh Doherty | RTE Culture | 25 September 2019
Paris Syndrome: Pushing boundaries to document experience | The Irish Times | 21 September 2019
Brilliant collection explores distant mysteries of the self | Irish Independent | 14 September 2019
Paris Syndrome reviewed by E.R. Murray | Writing.ie | 10 September 2019
Lucy Sweeney Byrne: Kenosis | Dublog | 9 September 2019
Listening to Music by Lucy Sweeney Byrne | Writing.ie | 9 September 2019
‘This is what comes to mind when I think of my twenties – being at sea’ | Image | 4 September 2019
Writer’s Block with Lucy Sweeney Byrne | The Gloss | 30 August 2019
Labelling literature and getting on with it: Banshee journal publishes its first book | The Irish Times | 14 May 2019
Praise for Paris Syndrome
“The book is consistently exciting, invigorating, challenging, surprising. It’s also very funny, Sweeney Byrne mining bright diamonds of humour from the black mud of her anxiety, suffering and morbid boredom. And she writes brilliantly”
“Sweeney Byrne manages to capture the optimism of someone with the world at their fingertips, yet wary about the vastness before her.”
“Sharp, insightful, funny; the whole collection is so believable, so astute, that at times it’s easy to forget that you’re reading fiction ... Paris Syndrome is an exciting and accomplished read”
“Paris Syndrome reads as radically contemporary. The battles that Lucy fights are those familiar to millennial readers ... Sweeney Byrne’s acerbic wit marks her apart.”
“Full of vitality and precision, and so rawly funny – this is a fabulous debut.”
“The voice is hugely self-aware, unafraid of turning her sharp light inward ... the details are vivid and the atmosphere tense throughout.”
“Harrowing and hilarious in equal measures – and often, somehow, at the same time – Paris Syndrome is an unforgettable portrait of millennial womanhood.”
“Fearless and wryly funny, the stories in Paris Syndrome are a finely calibrated mix of rage and wonder.”
“A feisty portrayal of the bleakness of modern life, full of fruitless longing, misplaced knowing and black irony.”
“Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s short stories achieve what the best in that robust form aspire to: transport us to worlds hitherto unknown, in company strange, and with a tingling sense of dread, giddiness, and awe.”
“The stories in Paris Syndrome are fresh and restless … Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s youthful protagonists face down the paradox of experiencing for the first time a world that feels, this late in history, terminally secondhand.”
“Gripping and beautiful, Paris Syndrome is spiced with the tang of many places, but it’s through the territory of the human soul that it ventures most bravely. It doesn’t just give you the world, it presents a universe.”
“With its tone of appalled hilarity, its roving portraiture of twentysomething lostness, and its narrator’s youthfully cruel perceptions – often turned squarely on herself – Paris Syndrome is an addictive, keeps-you-up-till-the-birds-are-singing read.”
“These stories of escape from the self, of detachment, of unnamed yearning, remind me of the work of Patti Smith and of John McGahern’s The Pornographer.”
“In Paris Syndrome, Lucy Sweeney Byrne manages to capture both the weariness and optimism of the eternal traveller. Whilst these stories are stunningly well-observed portraits of the unfamiliar, exotic and occasionally threatening communities briefly inhabited by the protagonists, they are, at heart, meditations on home, belonging and self. Each one explores, with unflinching honesty, what it means to be truly present in a place.”
“Lucy Sweeney Byrne captures the absurdity, passion and disabused hope encountered in work, love and travel in this vivid chronicle of a woman navigating a way through her twenties – that most disillusioning of the decades. Paris Syndrome explores a world where everything is possible except for permanency; where intensity and identity are fleeting, but where connection is still, in spite of it all, imperative.”