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From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
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Your support makes all the difference."Exile is in the mind and there is no cure for that," says Rafferty, an old Irish hobo in "Shovel Kings", the opening story of this elegiac collection.
Notions of home - real and flawed, imagined and Edenic - pulse through these stories, alongside its inverse - alienation, exile and spiritual homelessness.
Edna O'Brien's characters are, more often than not, suffering quiet yet implacable disappointments, in love, in family life and in factional communities, and it is testimony to O'Brien's supreme mastery of the short story format that so little happens on the surface, but beneath the walled-up exterior of the aggrieved mother, betrayed wife, raped child, the reader sees a chasm of pain, as they glimpse the tragedy of their lives.
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