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We’re delighted to welcome award-winning author Mary Morrissy to Waterstones Cork to celebrate the launch of her new collection Twenty-Twenty Vision ( Lilliput Press )Christine Beckett is faced with some home truths when her best friend, suffering from dementia, decides after a lifetime to be honest with her; Olivia Fletcher has an epiphany at a vaccination centre about a man who has loved her for decades; Bernard Travers revisits an unlikely romantic interlude with the mother of his teenage pen pal that has sustained him for 40 years.
Twenty-Twenty Vision is a collection of interlinked short stories about hindsight and late middle-age regret subtly framed within the first year of the pandemic. It's also a portrait, an emotional map of the 1950s generation moving into the third age with a mixture of apprehension and regret. The characters make chastening discoveries - one finds after a lifetime that she's a bullying victim, another draws up a curriculum vitae of her emotional life when there are no jobs left to apply for.
The work focuses on a handful of characters - Christine, Olivia, Possible, the overarching narrative is connected by character and situation, and united in theme, to form a tapestry of late middle-age reckoning. Bernard, Freddie, Triona and Eva - as they revisit their past and grapple with late-life perspectives.
Mary Morrissy is an award-winning Irish novelist (The Hennessy Award, Lannan Foundation Award) and short story writer, the author of four novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender, The Rising of Bella Casey and Penelope Unbound, as well as two collections of short stories, A Lazy Eye and Prosperity Drive. She has 20 years' experience of teaching creative writing at university level in the US and Ireland. Until May 2020, she was the associate director of creative writing at University College Cork.
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