Colm serves up shorts

With The Empty Family, he proves that he is equally adept at the short story. His fine new collection utilises settings as diverse as Texas, Barcelona, Wexford and New York, but finds its cohesion in mining the themes of division, death and the muted acceptances of lives devoid of grandeur. Characters return home, from exiles that for a while succeeded in masquerading as escapes, to family and places that no longer feel familiar. A sense of belonging has been lost and what survives is the repression from which they had fled. Invariably, but not exclusively, these characters are gay, middle-aged males, tormented by missteps. Hearts that have been broken remain so.

The stories that work best are recounted in the first-person. Minimal use of dialogue adds to their internal quality; they seem designed to be felt more than told. In the beautifully-measured The Pearl Fishers, the narrator meets a married couple, Donnacha and Grainne, whom he has known since school. As teens, he and Donnacha had an illicit love affair, but their secret pales alongside Grainne’s, which packs all the bang of a demolition incendiary. Inflections of religion lend an intriguing balance to the text and, through flashbacks, we watch the characters shape themselves towards the people they will become.