Nude

The women and men in Nude play out their desires and frustrations from Dublin to Paris, Delhi to Barcelona, and beyond. In these stories there are mercurial lovers, illicit affairs and mistakes that cannot be undone. And at the centre of it all is the unclothed body: in bedrooms, in art, and in and out of love. Award-winning writer Nuala N Chonchir uses her trademark sensual frankness, coupled with poetic language, to weave an intoxicating spell in these stories. If fictional worlds pivot on yearning, then the characters in these stories yearn for passion, for understanding and, sometimes, for freedom. In the opening tale, a naive painter travels to early 1970s Paris and meets fellow Irish artist Micheal OFarrell; there she becomes the model for his iconic political nude Madonna Irlanda. Elsewhere, a master art forger is infatuated with his lovingly carved alabaster sculpture of an Egyptian princess, but he eventually falls foul of the Art Squad and loses everything. The story Sloe Wine sees two teenage cousins begin a closer relationship with each other, while their mothers untangle the knots of their own teenage years and, in so doing, unleash a family secret. These are lush stories of visual art, the heart and the body, in all their beauties and betrayals; there is humour and quirkiness, but beneath that is the reassurance of truth the hallmark of all quality fiction.