‘Everything leaves marks, even water…’
Two children watching their parents argue inside a greenhouse, an armoured boy and his troubled sister, a human statue who’s lost the ability to move and a floating six year old tethered to the backyard fence: the characters in Jan Carson’s debut story collection are all falling apart in their own peculiar way.
Absurdist, allegorical and disturbingly convincing, these characters are both wrongdoers and victims of another’s wrongdoing. They are people marked by life yet struggling to forge some kind of future.
Mixing Carson’s distinctive magic realist voice with a more traditional brand of Irish literary fiction, Children’s Children explores the concept of legacy and the influence of one generation upon the next. These are darkly humorous and brilliantly illuminative stories which are both heartbreaking and hopeful and gently critical of post-conflict Northern Ireland.
Stories from this collection have appeared in Banshee, The Honest Ulsterman, Storm Cellar and other journals and have been longlisted for the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.