This story collection carries us like an outgoing tide, on a wave retreating from the underworld of 21st century London to a Dublin hinterland in the 1970's and beyond, to the time of coalmen, tenements, and bicycles. They're all here, the charmers, the snakes, the innocent, the complaisant, the guilt-ridden and the guilty, the Brothers, the whores, the poor and the young, the invulnerable, the jailed and the dead, the green and the truant,...