Living with Saints

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In a book that owes as much to Madonna the pop star as the Virgin Mary, Mary O'Connell presents a collection of stories in which the spirit of a female saint infuses and informs the experiences of contemporary women in difficult predicaments. St Agnes the Patron Saint of Girls delivers a hilarious running commentary to a high-school class being subjected to a hopelessly out-of-date sex-education video. St Anne, Patron Saint of Mothers, offers words of advice to a mother who sleeps with her boss in exchange for time off with her infant daughter.Though her heroines may hover on the brink of despair, Mary O'Connell retains a buoyant freshness throughout this collection, which takes the dusty icons down from their shelves, and sets their spirits lose in the modern world.

Reviews

A book in which despair is leavened with black humour and compassion is conveyed through a clear-eyed insight into faith, love, loss and longing. Comparisons with Lorrie Moore, Helen Simpson and Angela Carter would not be amiss - The Times

Mary O'Connell's wonderfully inventive story collection... is an extended hagiography of the everyday, written with quiet brio and acid humor, where the sacred and secular blur gloriously into one another... Smart, devout and blasphemous, LIVING WITH SAINTS reminds us that we "are entertaining the angels unawares" - Los Angeles Times

Mary O'Connell's effervescent short story collection regenerates a host of neglected Catholic icons and appropriates them for the 'Clueless' generation... The Pope may create new saints, but Mary O'Connell proves there's plenty of life in the old ones yet - Independent

,[Mary O'Connell's] dazzling first collection of short stories is both ancient and modern, sacred and profane. And funny into the bargain.' - Peter Stanford in Independent on Sunday

The writing is sharp, ironic, often hilarious... It is hard to believe that this is the author's first published collection. Her offbeat language is precisely aimed... Although the lives of Mary O'Connell's characters may seem light years away from her original inspiration, their various journeys towards enlightenment and apotheosis are not only sinfully f

Author Bio

Mary O'Connell is a graduate of the University of Kansas and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she studied under Thom Jones and Marilyn Robinson. She teaches at the Lawrence Arts Centre and is at work on a novel. Her grandmother was obsessed with saints.