In her assured fiction debut, Sheila Armstrong combines unsettling themes with the commonplace and reveals a keen eye for detail. The author, who is originally from Sligo and now lives in Dublin, sets several of these stories in her home country. Lemons is a response to the eighth amendment campaign in 2018. A woman’s life is described in terms of her body: a home abortion is “a pulling from deep inside”, while a mastectomy is “negative space, like a scoop removed from an ice-cream tub”. With an impressive economy, Armstrong distils each passing decade into a few paragraphs.
In the title story, a fisherman recounts in meticulous detail the gutting of a mackerel. Written in the second person as a series of numbered points, it builds tension through Armstrong’s deft foreshadowing: “Look your fish in the eye: they say the last thing a man sees is imprinted on his pupil. You check every catch this way for your own reflection, but there is only a dark hole of fright.”
