Cutting the Night in Two: short stories by Irish women writers, edited by Evelyn Conlon and Hans-Christian Oeser (New Island, £10.99)

Do we need anthologies of women's writing any more? Yes, say the editors of this one, we do: ; and it has a celebratory feel, reaching back to the early years of the 20th century to capture the voices of Nora Hoult and Elizabeth Bowen and stretching all the way to Blanaid McKinney's Please, first published in the year 2000. All of the stories have been published before - some, indeed, have begun to acquire the familiarity of lyric poetry - but still there are surprises. The unflinching honesty of the older stories makes them more shocking, despite their emotional and linguistic restraint,than the expletive-clad pieces from a younger generation. A certain wry humour despite the diversity of tone and subject matter, threads its way through the whole, as does an interest in the intimate. At their best the stories are irresistible - Mary Lavin's superb, bittersweet Lilacs, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's evocative, elegiac Summer Pudding, and Clare Boylan's hilarious The Stolen Child, in which a woman who makes off with a baby from outside a supermarket gets a lot more than she bargained for.