The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely

Rating:
Summary: The Green and the Orange
Review: A collection of fifty stories, previously published as the collections "Journey to the Seven Streams" "A Ball of Malt and Mandame Butterflly" "A Cow in the House" "A Letter to Peachtree" and the novella "Proxopera." Although each stands completely separately they share the same protagonist in varying guises, and many are told in the first person so that they hang together as a kind of autobiography of Benedict Kiely, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1919, raised in Omagh, and went to Uiversity College, Dublin.
Many of them contain lyrical descriptions of childhood scenes in rural Ireland and many are wonderfully comic, but violence and the clash between Catholic and Protestant are never far away. "Proxopera" is about a man whose family are held hostage to make him deliver a bomb to kill an old friend.