A bleak kind of optimism
From our UK edition
After several acclaimed novels, including last year's Pulitzer prize-winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo has now produced a volume of short stories. However, the qualities which endear the novels to their readers - a wry sense of humour, vivid characterisation and the sense of lives being lived over time - are less apparent here; the shorter form has created a sterner and more uncomfortable writer. In the title story, 'the whore's child' is an elderly Belgian nun who joins the narrator's creative-writing class. Sister Ursula writes several accounts of her own life, the unchanging details of which are that she is the daughter of a prostitute, and that she was sent to a convent by a father she hardly knew and has spent the rest of her life worshipping.