The Avelrow shelf
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Genealogical Mystery
Maeve Doyle
The first thing Nora Ashe saved from the fire was not the photograph, though later everyone would assume it was. They would imagine her standing in the smoke with the archive box clutched to her ribs, heroic and tragic in the way people preferred women to be when they were useful after disaster. They would picture flames licking up the old municipal curtains, the brass plaque of the Ballybrack Community Memory Project glowing hot beside the door, Nora choosing the faces of the dead over her own lungs.
Contemporary Women's Fiction
Laura Carpenter
The first emergency light in the Galway count centre went red at twenty-three minutes past six, and every person beneath it pretended not to notice. That was how counties survived themselves: by giving danger a polite nod, making room for it beside the tea urn, and calling the whole performance community. Maeve Killeen noticed. She always noticed. Door codes, lanyard colours, the way a superintendent held his phone face down when a councillor’s wife passed, the little pause before a clerk said a name that used to be protected by old money.