Telling

Evelyn Conlon is one of Ireland's most esteemed and best-loved writers. As well as a novelist she is a short-story writer and occasional essayist. Born in Ireland, she lived for a number of years in Australia and travelled extensively there and in Asia. She has edited four anthologies including Cutting the Night in Two. She has been writer in residence in numerous places, including Dublin City Libraries, University College Dublin, Jerusalem, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Skin of Dreams was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year; the title story of her collection Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour was performed at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Her novel Not the Same Sky was published by Wakefield Press, Australia in 2013. She has published four novels and three collections of short stories, has been widely anthologised, and her works have been translated into many languages including Tamil and Chinese. She is a member of Aosdána, an association of Ireland's most important and respected artists, and lives in Dublin.

Presenting nineteen of her best-loved tales, Telling is a triumphant demonstration of the achievement of one of Ireland's most boldly original writers.

A PR man loses his professional self-assurance; a chance encounter with an ex-lover leaves a woman with an unnerving sense of the emptiness of her marriage; a young man suddenly finds himself the underdog in his life-long struggle with his twin brother.


Bleak moments of self-discovery are counterpointed with characteristically wry humour, as Conlon uncovers with deft irony the double standards that bedevil dealings between men and women everywhere.


Evelyn Conlon is one of Ireland's most esteemed writers of fiction. The Times has described her as: "a genuinely exploratory writer, true to every kink which her imagination puts into her characters … her work is excitingly original."