This is going to be difficult to describe. Devlin does something here which I consider to be both masterful and rare, but which doesn’t sound right when I try to put it into words—she leaves us floundering, but in precisely the right way. We are dropped mid-current into a time and place that will never fully reveal themselves to us, introduced to characters that will remain (just, exquisitely) beyond our understanding, and delivered an ending that isn’t an ending. She does everything wrong, in other words, at least according to the tenets of convention. But this is how, in the hands of a skilled writer, a short story can be an enormity, exceeding the limits of a reader’s vision. The lack of resolution is the resolution—the clarifying in our view of a world, depicted in miniature, that is anything but miniature. You will not need the reassurance of obvious meaning if you read ‘Home, Sisters’. You will not need to formulate a quick response—the story will move into you, to stay.

Winner of the 2019 Benedict Kiely Short Story competition, as yet uncollected but available online on the Irish Times website