Features ‘The Calm’, longlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Writing.ie Short Story of the Year 2020.
Some Days Are Better Than Ours is a startling collection that explores human life in all its forms. These stories will make you draw breath as you race through compelling accounts of the dark places people escape to and from.
Through her masterful use of language, Barbara Byar skilfully invites the reader into imagined futures and regretful pasts – from war to childhood to road trips to relationships. Her pieces are visceral, sometimes brutal but sliced through with hope. These stories, and the characters in them, strike straight at the realist heart of the human experience and will linger long after reading.
A must-read collection These stories stopped me in my tracks.
—Gaynor Jones, Northern Writer of the Year
These are searingly truthful fictions. Pitched at the border of poetry and prose, they catalogue lives lived at the edge, survivors facing the beauty and cruelty of the world. These fictions will take your breath away.
—William Wall, author of Suzy Suzy and Grace’s Day
Betrayal and brokenheartedness, sex and sadness, disaster and divorce – in Some Days Are Better Than Ours: A Collection of Tragedies, the wants and wounds of Byar’s characters are stark, startling, and unforgettable.
—Meg Pillow, 2019 Wigleaf top 50
Barbara Byar writes flash like no one else; in each of these lucid and furious twenty-nine stories — some no longer than a single page — are wholly unforgettable glimpses into the lives of her individual characters.
—Peter Jordan, author of Calls to Distant Places
Some Days Are Better Than Ours delves into lives misshapen by abuse, exploring the dark side of the will and the flaring of lost souls. Byar’s language is gritty with rage, giving a lucid voice to the vulnerable, the marginalised, the roughshod, all fighting for what has been stolen and squandered, and looking for love between the cracks.
—Catherine McNamara, author of The Cartography of Others
Some Days Are Better Than Ours is an incredibly well-written and emotionally complex journey to the dark places of human experience. Clever, introspective and fearless, this collection will take you to places you never imagined before. A raw and relentless debut collection.
—Anita Goveas, author of Families and Other Natural Disasters (forthcoming, Reflex Press)
Barbara Byar’s Some Days Are Better Than Ours is a collection of flash fictions that dig deep into trauma, tapping into a well of strong emotions. You won’t be able to forget these hard-hitting stories very soon.
—Sophie van Llewyn, author of Bottled Goods, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019
Barbara Byar is an American immigrant into Ireland who lives in County Kerry with her two sons and two dogs. A previous Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair winner, she’s had pieces in various zines, including: Ghost Parachute, Anti-Heroin Chic, Flash Fiction February, Spelk, The Corridor, EllipsisZine, Litro, and Cabinet of Heed. She was short-listed for the 2017 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award and long listed for the 2017 Bare Fiction Prize. Barbara is also a reader and Senior Editor for TSS Publishing, UK and Virtual Zine.
Sam Payne –
These flash fictions are just simply incredible. Barbara Byer writes about unsettling subjects but each one of her characters is wholly recognisable. The first story in the book, which also lends its title to the whole collection, took my breath away and stayed with me long after reading it, but each and every one of these stories is mighty enough to knock you off your feet. At the time of writing this review I have only read this collection once but I know without a doubt that I will keep returning to it because it is so good!
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Kathy HOyle –
‘In her dreams she pirouettes through galaxies’ – the reader rips through time and space in this unrelenting anthology of tragedies. The writing is sharp and intrusive, pulling the reader apart piece by piece and rattling teeth along the way. From the deeply unsettling ‘Some Days Are Better Than Ours’ to the heart-stopping poignancy of ‘Bear’, Byer doesn’t let up, each story delivering a stratospheric emotional punch. An absolute masterclass in flash fiction, the stories in this anthology will stay with you long after you close the final page.
B F Jones –
I’m always admirative of authors that can bring entire worlds, depict insanely convincing characters and trigger numerous emotions with only a few words, a few strokes of the pen. Barbara Byar is one of those authors.
In Some Days Are Better Than Ours, she takes us through the tragic lives of numerous characters – families shattered by death, disease and broken marriages, abuse survivors on a quest for revenge, broken souls trying a new path, children destroyed by war. She explores recurrent themes using different styles, varying the poetic, the emotional, the raw or the R-rated and she excels at all.
The most predominant theme recurring throughout the collection is the one of abuse – physical, sexual, psychological; but also the substance abuse, often the catalyst to those tragedies.
Byar is the voices of numerous victims – fragile mothers, innocent children, naive teenagers. She uses her strong style to denounce ugly truths, shout her anger and disgust. She traps the reader in haunting words and scenes, where what isn’t said is scarier than what is; showing the world through a peep hole, only revealing fragments of a complete picture that might be too difficult to stomach.
She takes us on a wild ride through continents, alternating stories from her native US with the ones from her adoptive Ireland. While the Irish ones tend to be more of the huis-clos type, suffocating domestic dramas from which there is no escape, the US ones are wilder, more theatrical, with dramatic landscapes and fast-paced actions.
Her stories also take us through time, as they spam from WW2 to a near future.
Her war stories are so vivid they are almost cinematographic, bringing the past right before the reader’s eyes.
As for her more dystopian ones, they feel like the artist mucked her canvas with a thick coat of bleakness, showing us an intriguing and terrifying world that doesn’t yet exist but that might not be far off.
The tragedies in this collection are not the Romeo & Juliet theatrical type ones. They are the everyday tragedies.
They are the tragedies that happen behind your neighbour’s closed doors. The wrong turns taken at some stage in life, the choices that result in a world of pain. But in some of stories, it’s not too late to turn things back around and the author drip feeds hope throughout. She also brings humour and hints of surrealism to the collection, making it a multifaceted wonder.
Barbara Byar is never very far concealed behind her characters who she either protects or castigate. Her book exposes unpleasant truths, shows ugly worlds coated with beautiful words. The result is gutsy, brave and honest, it makes you think, cry and feel, and it stay with you long after you’ve closed the book on its stunning final story.
Laura Danks –
A brilliant collection of stories that will stay with you for a long time after you finish reading them. The precise and beautifully crafted prose is the delicate vessel that delivers edges stories that pack a real punch.
Jan Kaneen –
Just finished this astonishing collection of flash fictions and am still reeling. Using symbols on a page to evoke experience/emotion/empathy/fear/concern is such a strange and all-encompassing phenomenon when done well. Like witchcraft. These tiny transporting moments are visceral, searing, heart-breaking, rage-making, ugly-beautiful, lyrical, tender, real.
Donna McLean (verified owner) –
Powerful, sharp collection by Barbara Byar. The kind of writing that reaches out and nips you. It’s tough and it’s tender. Barbara is the queen of flash fiction.
Katie Piper (verified owner) –
A must-read collection. A kind of gruelling truth is revealed through small but heavy-duty tragedies in these stories. I will refer back to this collection many times.