Prosperity Drive

Overview

Heartbreaking and hilarious in turn, always incisive and exquisitely written, a stunning book of linked stories by a major Irish writer

All the characters in this mesmerizing book begin their journeys on Prosperity Drive. Everything radiates out—often internationally—from this suburban Dublin street, and everything eventually returns to it. It is an Ireland in miniature. Like an exploded novel, Prosperity Drive is laid out in stories, linked by its characters who appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage, or memory. While each story is discrete, and stands perfectly alone, when read together they have an extraordinary cumulative effect. Through the central drama of the Elworthy family, the collection has a strong narrative arc, very similar to that of a novel, making explicit to the reader secrets withheld from the characters. A stunningly original construction, this journey in stories is very much like life itself: a series of circles and trajectories, a process of learning how to love and how to lose that love.

Reviews

"She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers . . . Her clear-eyed vision and her deep compassion, along with her lovely sense of the comic and her exceptional literary articulacy, make this an outstanding collection." —Irish Times

"Mary Morrissy is a wonderful writer. These stories are entertaining and deft, so skilfully balanced and interwoven that when you begin to pick out the pattern it is a real moment of delight." —Hilary Mantel

"Morrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle." —Daily Mail

"Story by story [Morrissy] stitches together a hundred tiny plots, moving backwards and forwards across 60 years, and outwards to Italy, America, Australia and Vietnam… Morrissy proves herself a steady observer of the bleakness of everyday life, as well as when bleakness becomes catastrophe." —Observer

"One of the best Irish books you'll read this year." —Sunday Business Post

Author Biography

Mary Morrissy has published three novels—Mother of Pearl, The Pretender, and The Rising of Bella Casey—and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye. She has won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Literary Foundation Award.