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An Arrow in Flight
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An Arrow in Flight

By: Mary Lavin, Colm Toibin - introduction
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight.

SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TÓIBÍN

Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen.

Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin’s work is largely unpublished and overlooked. This collection re-establishes her as one of the most genius, irresistible and memorable voices of the last century.

SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TOÍBÍN

‘She is, to come right out with it, magnificent’ New York Times

‘Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other’ Sunday Times

‘Lavin writes like a dream’ New York Times Book Review

© Mary Lavin 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Anthologies & Short Stories European Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Short Stories World Literature

Critic reviews

Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They're important work (Richard Ford)
She is, to come right out with it, magnificent
She reminds us…what literature is about (Anthony Burgess)
Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other
She fascinates me more than any other of the Irish writers of my generation (Frank O’Connor)
Mary Lavin is keeping the stronghold of the Irish story in first-rate repair
Mary Lavin's prose has the simplicity and glow of time-polished wood
Caustic and also lyrical, she sees Ireland, even in its most obscure aspects, with a visionary penetration (Seamus Deane)
[Lavin] writes like a dream
These sombre and skilfully written stories describe the tragic dilemmas with which character and nature confront humans everywhere
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