The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Figure in a Photograph: A Short Story from 'Where Have You Been?'

Figure in a Photograph: A Short Story from 'Where Have You Been?'

Summary

‘Everyone should try childcare with a hangover. Once.’

Sean Hyland’s wife has left him in Dublin for the weekend, home alone with their infant daughter and teenage son. He has never felt more middle aged... Figure in a Photograph is a tender, funny and quietly poignant story that takes us to the heart of fatherhood and marriage, via skateboards, Jeremy Kyle and ectoplasms of snot.

This story is taken from Where Have You Been?, award-winning novelist Joseph O'Connor's first collection of short stories in more than twenty years.

Ranging from urgently contemporary London and Dublin to New York's Lower East Side in the nineteenth century, from dark comedy to poignancy, from the wryly provocative to the quietly beautiful, Where Have You Been? offers a gathering of dreamers and lost souls who contend with the confusions of living.

An entertaining and life-affirming read from the internationally acclaimed author of Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls and Ghost Light.

The full physical and digital editions will be available on 4th October 2012.

Reviews

  • Ireland's greatest storyteller
    Sunday Independent

About the author

Joseph O'Connor

Joseph O’Connor’s fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea, Ghost Light, Shadowplay and My Father’s House, a Washington Post Book of the Year. His work has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award, twice for the Whitbread/Costa and twice for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi and Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Hennessy Writer of the Year and Hall of Fame Awards, the Eason/An Post Novel of the Year Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Prix Madeline Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.


www.josephoconnorauthor.com
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more