A catastrophic road trip. An ill-advised career move. A sinister encounter on the beach. Expectations are high but motivations slippery, and romance has a rotten heart …

Old Romantics is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent. Unreliable, deceptive and flawed, Maggie Armstrong’s narrators navigate a world of devious attraction and latent hostility from first love through to motherhood.

Praise for Old Romantics

“Old Romantics is somehow both elegant and fiery. Maggie Armstrong's Dublin is full of surprises. An excellent debut.”

Nicole Flattery

“I remember reading Maggie Armstrong for the first time and thinking: I need to read everything this woman ever writes. Her stories are funny, wry, dark and brilliant. They scoop up a familiar world and serve it back to the reader defamiliarised, strange, off-kilter, but all the more real for that. She is sui generis, the kind of writer Viktor Shklovsky might have had in mind when he said that art exists 'to make one feel things, to make the stone stony'. The publication of Old Romantics is a major event, the first book by a major writer.”

Cathy Sweeney

“A feast of edgy, vivid, compelling writing from a storyteller of unique voice and rare skills.”

Joseph O'Connor

“Funny and awkward and honest and perceptive and shrewd ... a very exciting new voice in Irish fiction”

Louise O’Neill

“This collection is a high-wire balancing act; simmering menace juxtaposed with sardonic comedy and razor-sharp self-awareness. Unmissable.”

Sophie White