The Dogs of Inishere collects stories from across Alannah Hop-
kin’s thirty-year career as a fiction and travel writer. The stories presented here move from adolescence to middle age, sensitive always to the particular social, emotional, and intellectual challenges of the different phases of a life.
An adolescent girl bristles against the gendered assumptions and expectations o mid-sixties London. A young writer struggles to commit fully to the artist’s life. A group of pub regulars in a sleepy seaside town observe the quiet disappointments of love and marriage. Along the way, Hopkin’s protagonists, often writers themselves, wrestle with the influence of literary figures from the past, including Austen, Byron, Poe, Wilde, Lowry, and B.S. Johnson.