Pictures by Goya and other stories

In this new collection of short stories from Vincent O’Sullivan, the characters find themselves at points of crisis domestic, emotional, sometimes comic. These sharply observed, artful narratives test the borders of experience and imagination, confronting the assessment of memory. The characters are left to deal with recollections variously ironic, untrustworthy, sentimental and affirming. The stories attend, in a characteristically O’Sullivan manner, to a surprisingly wide interpretation of what New Zealand lives may mean. The ‘ordinary’ is presented with a hard-edged compassion.