A literary exploration of the lives of girls and women, from a writer more Americans should read

Calling an author’s work ambitious is often a polite way to say someone has tried and failed, but “Devotions,” the new short story collection from Northern Irish author Lucy Caldwell, is a genuinely ambitious and rewarding collection.

Read more Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular: How to watch and everything you need to know

Early in her career, Caldwell was lauded for her work as both a playwright and a novelist, but over the past decade, the Belfast-born author has emerged as one of the most exciting and prolific story writers in the United Kingdom. She was little known here until finally making her stateside debut in 2025 thanks to Sarah Jessica Parker (yes, that one), whose nascent indie imprint acquired the American rights to Caldwell’s historical novel “These Days” (2022). Around that same time, Caldwell’s century-old UK publisher, Faber & Faber, announced plans to establish a US division. And while the output from that new venture has been rather restrained in its first year, the past several months have seen its most significant project to date in the publication of not only Caldwell’s new story collection, “Devotions,” but also her three earlier volumes, “Multitudes” (2016), “Intimacies” (2021), and “Openings” (2024).

This comprehensive strategy makes particular sense for an author who approaches her stories holistically, writing in “Devotions” that her four collections represent “something unfolding in time, almost a single work.” None of Caldwell’s 43 stories are linked narratively, but each collection is united thematically and those themes mature roughly chronologically. “Multitudes” deals with adolescents, mainly girls, confronting their dawning desire for independence, the stirrings of physical attraction, and the search for one’s place in the world. “Intimacies” centers new or potential mothers filled with restraint and sensitivity, women who yearn but don’t take, who fear losing but haven’t yet lost. That collection includes the gorgeous, sliding doors story “All the People Were Mean and Bad,” which in 2021 won the BBC’s National Short Story Award, for which Caldwell has been nominated a record four times. (She shares that distinction with Sarah Hall, the award’s only two-time winner.) By “Openings,” children have grown older, marriages have started to fail, and Caldwell’s protagonists have made mistakes in their lives. That collection includes my favorite of her stories, “Daylight Raids,” about an adulterous couple during the London Blitz, a piece that unfolds like Caldwell is simply considering a writing prompt but slowly expands to relate an entire novel’s worth of life in just two dozen pages.

Now in “Devotions,” the mortal fears that had remained largely hypothetical for Caldwell’s protagonists have manifested, and parents, lovers, even children are dying or dead. Its protagonists, who are somehow displaced, either physically away from home or mentally elsewhere, don’t necessarily explore new territory, but they make broader, more existential assessments about our collective humanity, the value of art, and especially the role of fate vs. free will. This latter discussion is often considered in relation to the Catholic Church, which is more candidly discussed here than in Caldwell’s early stories, with one woman justifying her unwillingness to live in Northern Ireland because she “couldn’t condemn her daughters to grow up in a place with such a warped fundamentalist attitude to reproductive rights, and no safe, guaranteed access to abortion.”

“Hamlet, a love story,” the standout opener of “Devotions,” is the key to understanding what Caldwell is after in the collection. Narratively, 25-year-old Sonya sleeps with her theater troupe’s leading man after the group completes a run in New York City, but the tryst is freighted because it’s Sonya’s first since being widowed 18 months earlier. The troupe had been touring “Choose Your Own Hamlet,” in which the Prince of Denmark controls the course of Shakespeare’s tragedy after the conclusion of Act 1. The specifics of the conceit are less important than its implications, namely that someone, be they Hamlet or Sonya or any of us, could control their destiny. Reflecting on this prospect, Sonya says, “I couldn’t work out what was more insane: to live as if you wouldn’t die, or to live as if you would.”

Read more Wikipedia is battling for the soul of the Internet

That consideration, how to be or how not to be alive, is revisited throughout “Devotions.” In “A Family Christmas,” a 42-year-old mother of twins confronts the possibility of an unexpected and unsought pregnancy. In “All Grown Up,” Luke MacNamara, a rare male protagonist in Caldwell’s short fiction, reinvents his life after the death of his mother, a proposition made both easier and more complicated when he reconnects with the younger sister of his adolescent girlfriend. Late in that story, Luke echoes Sonya’s uncertainty when he muses that “You’d go mad … trying to put an order on things — believing that some things were or weren’t ‘fated.’”

The collection has three uncharacteristically slight stories, but finishes strong, with “The Lady of the House,” about a new aunt who feels life “slipping out of [her] grasp,” and the concluding titular story about a woman whose husband keeps their kids occupied so she can livestream a winter solstice celebration at Newgrange, a prehistoric tomb north of Dublin. As the event’s announcers wonder whether the clouds will clear before sunrise, they tell listeners, “We have to let go of our attachment to the outcome.”

That sentiment dovetails nicely with “The Ally Ally O,” the first story in Caldwell’s first collection, in which a mother cedes control to her daughters by allowing them to choose whether the car turns left, right, or continues straight at each intersection. The oldest daughter, who is obsessed with disasters — everything from earthquakes to Chernobyl — believes their mum must have “somehow steered [our] choices” to keep them safe. If Caldwell’s short story project were to end with “Devotions,” circling back to the idea that fate relies on knowing when and how to let go is a tremendously satisfying conclusion.

Read more Game 88: Red Sox at Angels lineups and notes

DEVOTIONS

By Lucy Caldwell

Faber & Faber, 208 pages, $17.95

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance critic.