Ranging from urgently contemporary London and Dublin to New York's Lower East Side in the nineteenth century, from dark comedy to poignancy, from the wryly provocative to the quietly beautiful, these stories - Joseph O'Connor's first collection in more than twenty years - offer a gathering of dreamers and lost souls who contend with the confusions of living. Here are men without women, children parenting...
In 2006 a British peace-keeping force was sent to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. Within weeks they were cut off and besieged by the Taliban. Here, in their own words and for the first time, are the young veterans of Herrick 4- alongside the words of the Taliban themselves. Fergusson examines the war in Helmand and asks this most troubling question: could Britain have avoided the violence altogether?