After Desire 

by Phyl Herbert

(Arlen House)

Readers can often be unsatisfied by short stories. Enter a world full of characters, soak up their stories, be guided by their choices and then, after only a few pages, remain powerless when the world end as the last page is turned. Short stories can be frustrating indeed. But not the ones told by Irish author Phyl Herbert.

This collection of nine tales explores the difficult and bewitching theme of desire and love. Herbert reveals profound and colourful characters with a rich past, all experiencing a key moment of their lives, asking them which path to follow and immersing them in their history to better understand their present relationships.

Most of the characters are facing their own secrets or the secrets of their relatives, and are trying as hard as they can to move on with their lives. Along the few pages of their stories, the readers discover them and their habits in their world as vividly described.

Through her characters, the author – a former English and drama teacher in the Prisons Education Service and Dublin’s Liberties College and is currently writing a play – questions the complexity of human relationships. A sister holding a heavy secret from her twin; between a mum and a daughter after the latter’s release from prison; between an inmate and a teacher; the first steps of a former nun who discover a world full of colours, music and men. Attraction, desire and love intermingle throughout stories sometimes leading to disappointment, sometimes to fresh discoveries.

After the drama textbook Literacy, Language, Role-play published in 1989, and the prose anthology Sixteen after Ten, Herbert brings us her debut collection of short stories with After Desire, transcribing a difficult and elusive subject with personal and touching sensations.