If you've seen the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Toby Jones, then you’ll know the work of London-Irish writer Bridget O’Connor.

She co-wrote the screenplay with husband Peter Straughan, for which they received an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA award in 2012. Sadly, the accolades were posthumous for O’Connor, who had died two years earlier of cancer.

She started out as a short story writer. In the 1990s and the noughties, O’Connor wrote two acclaimed collections, as well as plays for radio and the stage.

Her fiction is full of fast-talking, conscience-free characters, out for what they can get from others. Now a new selection of those stories have been published in the book After a Dance.

Synopsis

'These are some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I've read in a long time.' - Roddy Doyle, author of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

After a Dance is the compiled collection of short stories from acclaimed writer Bridget O'Connor, with an exclusive preface from the author's daughter, Constance Straughan.

Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday.

In After A Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here - at its best and at its delightful worst.

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