‘I always wanted to write stories – but back when I started, no one would get a story collection published if they hadn’t published a novel.” So says Alannah Hopkin, novelist, travel writer and critic.

And so she went “the sensible way,” as she calls it, and published two novels, A Joke Goes A Long Way In The Country, in 1982, and The Out-Haul in 1985, with her first collection of stories, The Dogs of Inishere, only appearing now, 30 years later.

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