Lost in the Familiar

This essay opens with a creative response to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s short story ‘The Shortcut through IKEA’ and continues with a reader’s appreciation of her 2012 short story collection The Shelter of Neighbours. Consisting of fourteen stories, the collection is set in the fictional south county Dublin estate of Dunroon Crescent. Each story draws, in one way or another, on the Irish proverb ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine (‘people live in one another's shelter’). Dunroon Crescent is a community in proximity, where connections have either been forged or exist solely because of geography. The estate’s inhabitants are detached from themselves and each other but their lives also overlap and intersect, illuminated by the light of their pasts, by remembered loss and the legacies of earlier choices.