Living With Saints

Dymphna Malone: saint or sinner? In a dazzling collection that owes more to the spirit of Madonna than the Blessed Virgin, Mary O'Connell takes the dusty icons down from the shelves and sets their spirits loose on the modern world.

A schoolgirl aborts her baby; another submits to the incestuous demands of her father; a tourist discovers passion in a bedsit on the Seven Sisters Road. In writing uniquely alive to the magic, hurt and humour of women's lives, these stories introduce us to a thrilling company of patron saints and a deliciously worldly brand of female wisdom.

So Saint Catherine Laboure plies her trade in a tattoo parlour. A giddy Saint Martha recalls the thrill of embracing Christ. A wise-cracking Saint Anne offers advice on lecherous bosses and the modern heartbreak of balancing work and motherhood. Not since Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber' have tales-of-old been retold with such imaginative buoyancy, or such an addictive sense of fun.

'Living With Saints' presents a world where miracles are possible, a conception might well be immaculate and deliverance comes in the unlikely shape of a Marlboro-smoking Carmelite nun. By the sheer brilliance of her storytelling, Mary O'Connell reveals the writer's power to depict life as it is, and to remake it with humour, passion and courage.