Modern Times

Cathy Sweeney's stories have already attracted a band of fanatical devotees, and this first collection is as marvellous as we could have hoped for. A unique imagination, a brilliant debut.Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney's inventive debut collection, offers snapshots of an unsettling, dislocated world. Surprising and uncanny, funny and transgressive, these stories only look like distortions of reality. - Irish TimesI loved this collection. It vibrates with a glorious strangeness! Magnificently weird, hugely entertaining, deeply profound.In Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney gives us fables of the present that are funny, vertiginous and melancholy.With a crispness and clarity and weirdness unlike any other fiction being published now ... Sometimes chilling, eerily accessible - and as wickedly droll as they are horrifying ... The voice running through is lucid and bright and highly readable, each sentence stripped clean and polished ... The stories themselves, long-sweeping, succinctly told anatomies of spectral lives lived in sad rented places or loveless middle-class homes, are absolutely for this moment. - Irish IndependentSweeney's stories are wacky, bold, form-bending ... Reading Modern Times is a bit like being in a strange dream ... Powerful ... Daring - Irish Times