Nude

Nakedness rather than sex is the theme of Nuala Ni Chonchuir's Nude, nakedness and hiding linked like natural opposites, the delicacy of encounters and then the blunt proposition, the subterfuge and the revelation. Over it all is an elegant simplicity of language, a quilt of metaphor. Art and beauty are the threads that hold it together and ravel the lives of her characters. A beautiful collection of stories about beauty. -- William Wall, author of 'This Is The Country' Nuala Ni Chonchuir's stories in her extraordinary collection, Nude, are at once ravishingly sexual and achingly, vulnerably human. The title not only refers to the body but to the human heart. She understands both with profound delicacy and compassion, and she has a pitch-perfect narrative voice to illuminate truths that are rarely spoken. -- Robert Olen Butler author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Award-winning writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir uses sensual frankness and poetic language, to weave a spell around the reader in Nude. We find mercurial lovers and illicit affairs from Dublin to Paris, Delhi to Barcelona. And at the centre of it all is the unclothed body: in bedrooms, in art, and in and out of love.

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 Ní Chonchúir 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 1970’s Paris and meets fellow Irish artist Micheal O’Farrell; 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.