One of the leading figures of Irish writing, Bardwell is a novelist, poet, playwright, and short-story writer whose fiction has appeared on best-seller lists abroad and is accorded classic status at home. Bardwell’s penetrating, unflinching short stories, originally published in 1987, deal with a range of issues that still resonate with readers today. These stories, like her poetry, record what Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has called "the shocks of our time, the private impacts, and the historic changes."