“Cat Person”, the short story which went viral in The New Yorker is what made Roupenian famous – read by millions of people across the globe when it was published in 2018. ‘You Know You Want This’, Kristen Roupenian, published by Jonathan Cape: £8.77, Amazon This is a full house of brilliance – not a dud work in sight. O’Neill writes about shame so brilliantly, so viscerally, and with such brutality that this story cannot fail to haunt you.

Louise O’Neill’s “Legends” tells the toe-curling story of an intelligent but emotionally unsound young woman who has returned from college to her provincial village but finds herself in a degrading situation that only serves to exacerbate her self-destructive tendencies. In “A Partial List of the Saved”, Danielle Mclaughlin writes of a recently divorced man who warns off his elderly father’s girlfriend, only to find out she is leaving him anyway. Sally Rooney’s “Colour and Light” tackles isolation, success and power play as two mutually interested parties with their own insecurities fail to act satisfactorily on what is clear flirtation. “The Swimmers” is a queasy, uncomfortable read given that the narrator is the young, naive son of a paedophile who drives young boys to their swimming lessons in a smelly old bus. Each story jolts you far from the previous one. Written by Yan Ge, we see Ireland through the eyes of an immigrant, from someone who straddles two worlds and cultures. The first story, about a woman who falls in love with a dead man, is an immediate challenge to what we might think it means to be Irish. The name of volume derives from a phrase by poet and playwright Louis MacNeice, who once wrote of “the drunkenness of things being various”.

Caldwell’s introduction serves as a rationale which questions extensively what it means to be Irish, although the entire collection does this, too. ‘Being Various: New Irish Short Stories’ edited by Lucy Caldwell, published by Faber & Faber: £12.99, Faber & FaberĮach of the stories in this anthology have been commissioned especially – which is a real treat for short story lovers.

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