Fiadh Callister

Book Club Fiction

A House Built Sideways

Fiadh Callister

The locket arrived in the committee room inside a cake tin that had once belonged to somebody’s grandmother, which meant, in Ardglass Junction, that no one touched it without first complimenting the tin. It was blue enamel, chipped along the rim, lined with greaseproof paper, and placed with theatrical care in the exact centre of the trestle table beneath the newly framed photograph of the restored station.

Book Club Fiction

AE for the Heartbroken

Fiadh Callister

The first thing Dr. Nessa Byrne noticed about a bad night was never the screaming. People imagined the screaming. They imagined sirens coming in hot, blood on white floors, doctors running with heroic urgency and someone shouting for a crash trolley while the music swelled. That was television. In Mercy South Hospital, on the north side of Cork city in the third week of January, bad nights usually announced themselves with quieter things.

Book Club Fiction

Before the Golden Promise

Fiadh Callister

The promise broke in front of everyone. It did not crack quietly in a kitchen or soften into something private and survivable; it snapped beneath the gold lights of the town hall, with three hundred phones raised, a minister smiling too hard, and Evelyn Hart standing at the lectern with her dead mother's brooch pinned over her heart like a little sun that had forgotten how to warm anything.

Book Club Fiction

Before the Quiet Threshold

Fiadh Callister

The applause broke before Orla Wren reached the microphone. Not faded, not faltered, but broke, as if somebody had taken the room by both shoulders and shaken the manners out of it. One moment three hundred people were standing beneath the glass roof of the civic hall, clapping for the woman who had saved Threshold House from demolition; the next, a stranger in a green wool coat had lifted a brass strip from the ceremonial plinth and held it over her head like evidence at a trial.

Book Club Fiction

Borrowed Vows Volume One

Fiadh Callister

Borrowed Vows · Book 1

Promise Law Lantern Rain came in sideways, the kind that found the gap between collar and skin and wrote its name there. Aisling stood beneath the Civic Offices overhang, watching the Liffey move like a dark thought. The river threw up the city in little broken pieces—lamp filigree, bus lights, the pale oval of a gull—and she let it. Her hands were stuffed into her coat pockets, fingers worrying the corner of an index card until it went soft at the edges.

Book Club Fiction

Growing Together

Fiadh Callister

The Kettle Song She lets the kettle sing because if she cuts the song short, the day will feel unfinished. Steam rounds the kitchen window; she rubs a small circle clear with her knuckles and sees the Liffey in its expensive grey. Seven months along, nineteen years old, and somehow both. Orla answers her palm with a deliberate push—hello, I’m here—then settles like tide easing against a harbour wall.