We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.

A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.