This, Wendy’s first short story, appeared in the May 2016 issue of The Stinging Fly and would later feature in her debut collection Sweet Home (2018). Her second collection Dance Moves (2022) supports a claim that she has done for contemporary Belfast what Joyce did for Dublin a century earlier. I thought long and hard about sharing a representative paragraph from one of the stories but couldn’t bring myself to dismember (as it were) such perfectly-crafted prose. If you know Wendy’s work you’ll understand; if you don’t you have a revelation in store.
Her debut novel The Benefactors (2025), among the very best novels of the year, met with popular and critical acclaim. Will there be more short stories? Let’s all hope so.
First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 34, Vol 2, 2016, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Sweet Home, Stinging Fly/Picador, 2018
