She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs-- she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.

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

One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.

Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.