Thirty years after Mary Lavin’s death, it’s excellent to have her skill as a writer of short stories handsomely showcased by Colm Tóibín. ‘Trastevere’, the opening choice of his selection, begins in New York, where Mrs Traske, a middle-aged writer, is shocked to hear that Della, a young woman she recently met in Italy, has killed herself. It then swerves back to an evening in Rome. The location – an apartment rented by young Americans in a once-magnificent palazzo amid the picturesque squalor of Trastevere’s alleys – is remote from the Dublin streets and the farms and fields of County Meath around which Lavin’s imagination customarily ranges. But depicted with her usual vividness, it is the setting for a scenario quivering with what is her pervading fictional concern: unease. 

Della, the wife of a would-be poet, unsettlingly presides over a dinner party in the grandiose premises that her lucrative job enables them to rent. As the meal proceeds, Lavin catches with pitch-­perfect acuteness responses that are slightly off key. Odd shifts of tone that undermine and disconcert without becoming blatant steadily accumulate. In retrospect, these seem faint Geiger-counter soundings of disaster to come.

Mrs Traske, something of an alter ego in Lavin’s fiction, reappears in the final story here, ‘The Cuckoo Spit’, and could well be the unnamed narrator of another, ‘A Story with a Pattern’. She recalls being taken to task at a literary party for writing stories that ‘have hardly any