Irish Stories (Everyman’s Pocket Classics, £15)Covering 200 years of Irish stories is a challenging brief. While every reader seeks their favourites in a table of contents, this collection edited by Christopher Morash of Trinity College delivers a fair compendium of work. Within, we find a blend of forms, such as rural folk collected by Lady Gregory, or the more urban imaginations of Sheridan Le Fanu and Flann O’Brien. The plain elegance of Elizabeth Bowen is here, as is the abstract of Samuel Beckett. From the Irish, Pádraic Ó Conaire’s An Chiotáil delivers a perfect precursor to flash fiction. Contemporary authors include Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan, Kevin Barry, Lucy Caldwell and more. It’s a pleasingly weighty tome in a petite trim, which can be read straight through or dipped into at leisure. Helena MulkernsFieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy (Brazen, £16.99)In prose flowing like a digital feed, Meena Kandasamy’s fourth novel examines the shrapnel of a deepfake porn attack on a young Indian woman living in London. Amy’s role in upholding the purity of the Brahmin, the highest caste in the Hindu hierarchy, anchors the story. Her high erotic autonomy is detailed with momentum, but this particular video is fake, non-consensual and trending at number one in Indian internet searches. The digital village wants a public stoning. Stunned and bumbling, she relies on her flesh-and-blood community for help. Friends and family provide insight to layers of queerness, white saviourism, patriarchy and femicide, narrowly avoiding being disposable exposition characters. Kandasamy, who describes herself as a provocateur, successfully deconstructs assumptions of social and familial sentiment through fresh, fragmented narrative. Céire SadlierCatholicism: End or Beginning? by Mary Daly, (Cambridge University Press, £29.99)This hitherto unknown work by the late feminist theologian Mary Daly is the product of a transitional period between her early attempts to reconcile feminism with Catholicism and her later rejection of reformist solutions in favour of more revolutionary thinking. Daly’s work is dense and one gets the sense that this incomplete work is not fully elaborated. However, there is a heartfelt call for an active and thinking “adult” faith beyond mere assent to a narrowly defined series of propositions like a child in catechism. Many of the theological and institutional limitations Daly penetratingly surveys in both Catholicism and Protestantism still resound today. Appended with this unfinished treatise are a number of essays from diverse contributors, surveying its context and implications. Seoirse Swanton