This award-winning young writer delivers a debut collection of stories that ranges widely across themes of longing, identity, destiny and desire.

Heat and Light is divided into three parts: ‘Heat’, ‘Water’ and ‘Light’. Each part has a distinct character, but a restless yearning underlies all three.

‘Heat’ is a sequence of five linked stories that unspool the secrets of the Kerrigan family. It is a strong, sinewy sequence, almost a novella, with a definite gothic undertone of carelessness and retribution. It opens with 20-something Amy discovering that the woman she has known as her grandmother is in fact her grandmother’s sister. Her real grandmother is Pearl, a beautiful, mysterious woman with an affinity for the wind …

Read the rest of this review at the Newtown Review of Books.