And I thought A Week in Winter was the late Maeve Binchy's final book!All praise to public libraries with their shelves of new books for browsers like me. As noted in the introduction by her widower, Binchy regularly wrote short stories and kept them in a drawer for potential future use. This collection brings together a series of stories that revolve around the fictional Chestnut Street in Dublin: a place of dreamers and lovers, sad-sacks and successes. Some of the stories are more fully formed and are more satisfying than others; some are only character sketches or proto-stories. There are characters that could have been snapped into one of the earlier novels--unknown and yet familiar, like long-lost friends. These stories really helped me understand a quality of Binchy's writing--that she was really a fabulist, a teller of fables. There are implicit morals to almost all of these tales: take a chance on love, be careful in how you share your opinions, kindness wins out in the end, etc. And that's part of what makes Binchy's universe a comfortable place to be, because there is an orderliness to life as she describes it. As soon as the "cold" weather starts in San Diego, my first hankering is for Maeve Binchy's stories. It may be that I associate Ireland with cold, chilly weather and I want to get inside the lives described in the book. So I curl up and get lost in the world of characters who fall in love, out of love, get cheated on, find happiness and friendships, where family ties are strengthened or lost for good. Overall it is nothing more than normal lives that normal people live, but told in such a way that it's fascinating. This book does not concentrate in one family, it's a series of short stories of people who live on Chestnut Street through the decades.Binchy usually dates her books by mentioning events that mark the country's history. In this case it was Ireland in the World Cup and the referendum to allow divorce. It gives an extra layer in her books, if they are read in order of publication, the reader will get a historical education of the social, economic and political conditions of the country and how it shaped the lives of its citizens.Even though I know I will re-read her books over and over again, I'm glad I still have books I haven't read yet, I'm savoring them!
What do You think about Chestnut Street (2014)?
A nice collection of stories about the folks who live on Chestnut Street.
—c3elisah
Lovely short stories. I really got caught up in the characters.
—devu
Most of the short stories were good. Some were predictable.
—immaculate
