How does one live a good life? If you鈥檙e Pat Graves, you change your name to Cecile Collette, move to Cleveland, and join three churches and the Rotary Club. For Cecile, who will reinvent herself again before the story ends, it may be possible to make Michigan and everything else she touches beautiful, but she鈥檒l come to grief when she tries to redesign another human being. In the title story, Mackenzie, a girl without looks or potential, builds a full life in Paris, based on the sketchy belief that she had an ancestor renowned for being dauntless. College freshman Adam, holding a fantasy of his newly discovered father, finds the man broke and foolish; still he does all he can to rescue his dad from a disastrous contract. Kate, convinced she鈥檚 doing the right thing, helps her cousin gain full custody of his daughter, only realizing years later the truth of what happened. Watching CNN, a grandmother recalls a date she once had with a man now giving advice on foreign policy. Whether set in Scandinavia, America, France, England, Australia, or Nepal, these stories champion those who are tenacious in the face of life鈥檚 surprises.
鈥淭hese exquisite stories showcase Eileen O鈥橪eary鈥檚 prodigious talent and singular voice. Ancestry is rich with humor and pathos, and features some of the sharpest dialogue I鈥檝e ever read. An absolute delight.鈥濃擪irstin Chen, author, Bury What We Cannot Take
鈥Ancestry takes us on a dazzlingly eclectic ride alongside a cast of human beings trying, with varying degrees of desperation, to simply live lives worth living. One hears hints of George Saunders here, but also Deborah Eisenberg and Ann Beattie: narratives with the clarity of a ringing bell simultaneously garbed in a complexity that feels imminent and irreversible. O鈥橪eary is a talent not to be missed.鈥濃擟hristian Kiefer, author, Phantoms
鈥溾楬e would adjust,鈥 Eileen O鈥橪eary writes of a grieving newcomer to Nepal, in this compassionate and continent-spanning collection. 鈥楬e would learn the customs and some words and a way to get around. Wasn鈥檛 that what people did?鈥 It鈥檚 what O鈥橪eary鈥檚 people do; confronted with the gulf between dreams and reality, they bend but for the most part don鈥檛 break.鈥濃擳om Drury, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award
鈥淲itty yet tender, Ancestry is a remarkable collection. It subtly explores the dark matter at the center of every life, asking the wicked and important questions. The answers startle and uplift鈥攖hey remind us how large every human heart is.鈥濃擠erek Palacio, author, The Mortifications
鈥淓ileen O鈥橪eary is a connoisseur of the endlessly clever, endlessly futile ways we try to escape ourselves. With wit as crisp as a dry martini, she sees right through us鈥攑arents and children, divorces and dinner parties, paper-thin identities, the giddy free-fall of psychic disintegration鈥攁nd surgically extracts these elegant and companionable reports of private apocalypse.鈥濃擝rian Conn, author, The Fixed Stars
