A young Irish vagrant with a strange talent wanders Kew Gardens. She knows that the weather won’t be dry tomorrow, and the impending rain casts her mind back to a riverbank, where a leery fisherman once asked her to turn and grab his net for him. It wasn’t just the fish that he wanted to catch.

The same fisherman, years later, will run into a shy childhood friend and become smitten with his new wife. She is drawn to his boldness and his confidence – but is it enough for him? She will leave home for a walk one day and never return – and her husband’s reveries will come crashing down.

In another time, in another place, a photographer notices two ghostly latent figures on pictures developed from his vintage reflex lens – a cheerful woman and a grizzled, intimidating man. The images become clearer with each expensive roll of film, but his dogged investigation of this mystery could cost him his livelihood and his love.

So spool out the lives in Catchlights: the past contains the present and future; shallow and deep acts of cruelty, love, selfishness and kindness reverberate for years, across continents. With each chapter conceived as a homage to a different Ladybird Book, Catchlights sets the innocence of childhood against the violence of adulthood, the joys of a passion against the horrors of an obsession, and the reality of death against the magic of life.

“Niamh Prior’s collection of interconnected short stories is a delight! Each one is a perfectly formed jewel and has the potential to be a novel, doing what a short story does best, leaving the reader to wonder what will happen to these protagonists next. Vivid characterisation, ingenious plotting and intelligent structuring amount to a most engaging read and indeed, a re-read as we put the jigsaw of these lives back together.” -Liz Nugent, award-winning and bestselling author of Unravelling Oliver and Our Little Cruelties.

Find Catchlights at Amazon.