Edna O'Brien presents delicious 'love object'

Put on a pot of tea and curl up with The Love Object, the new collection of Edna O'Brien stories. If you're lucky, it'll be cold, damp and misty outside.

Many of the 31 stories published between 1968 and 2011 are set in the mossy green Ireland of O'Brien's youth, a land of stunning physical beauty but also of "strange sacrificial women".

So proclaims the narrator of A Scandalous Woman, looking back on the sad fate of her best friend from childhood - a beautiful girl named Eily who had "fair skin and eyes ... as big and as soft and as transparent as ripe gooseberries". Eily is ostracized by her family and eventually driven mad because she had the temerity to have sex before marriage and the bad luck to get pregnant.