Lucy Caldwell's "Devotions"

In Devotions, "one of the finest short story writers at work today" (Wendy Erskine) explores yearning for distant pasts and unknown futures. A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. On a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he thought he had, and finds himself haunted by all he never will, comes to a painful new understanding of what it might mean to love. Transporting and profound, these are stories of love, grief, longing, of new beginnings, and the ways we find shelter in each other.

Born in Belfast in 1981, Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three previous collections of short stories. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she was also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019, and has won the E. M. Forster Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Walter Scott Prize among others.

Kelly E. Sullivan is the author of the novellas, The Moose Lottery (Stanchion Books) Winter Bayou (Lilliput Press, Dublin), and two poetry chapbooks, Fell Year (Green Bottle) and Toledo Blade (Danging Girl Press). Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Salmagundi, The Hopkins Review, Southword, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. She currently the interim director at Glucksman Ireland House NYU.