I’ve been reading!

Reading Ireland Month 2025

You can find out about RIM2025 at Cathy’s website you’ll also find lots of inspiration on what to read.

This train is for

Book blurb

Bernie McGill’s award-winning stories have been widely praised for their emotional depth and their lyrical language. She is a writer of profound sensitivity and observation. Her masterful deployment of linguistic precision and economy enables her to plumb the depths of human experience while neatly avoiding sentimentalism. This new collection, her first since 2013, contains unpublished stories along with a number of previously published stories featured within award winning anthologies.

My thoughts

This train is for by Bernie McGill is a collection of short stories which opens with the title story. This train is for is a beautifully written story of a brother travelling to see his dying sister. The priest had telephoned telling him to come as his sister, Lizzie, was near the end and wanted to see him.

He is recalling the past as he travels through Ireland. As the stations come and go they are named as if to keep them for posterity whilst he recalls childhood antics with Lizzie, going to grammar school, his mother, the rift that came, the last conversation, Helens reaction to those harsh words that he had repeated to her. It had been sixty years since he had left a young man with his bride.

It was curiosity that led him to go in the end. Would he regret it? Had he already had enough regret? Was it important to remember? Perhaps, but the troubles that brought sixty years of rift between him and his mother and sister had never been important to him or rather he hadn’t understood why love could not overcome the hatred but now they mattered less for this journey had returned something precious to him.

The stories

This train is for | There is More than One Word | A Loss | The Snagging List | The Escapologist | Glass Girl | A Fuss | The House of the Quartered Door | The Cure for Too Much Feeling | Nomad | Star Gazers | In the Interests of Wonder

There are twelve stories in this collection, as listed above, and each is a gem. Stories about human nature, connectivity, about life and they are each a beautifully crafted piece that sit in the mind lingering long after they have been read. This is a stunning collection of short stories. Bernie McGill is an author whose work I will seek out and which I would not hesitate to recommend as, in my opinion, she should be read as widely as possible by all who love beautiful writing and enjoy reading wonderful stories.

Previously read: Waiting for Joseph | Listen to Bernie’s short story ‘Waiting for Joseph’ read by Julia Dearden on BBC Radio 4.

Book: Purchased

Information

Published: No Alibis Press | ISBN9781838108175 |2 June 2022 | 188 pages

Buy: Publisher | Amazon | Hive | Bookshop.org (affiliate link) | Your local library | Your local bookshop

Author: Bernie McGill is the winner of the 2023 Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection, This Train is For. She is the author of two novels and one further short story collection. She has written audio scripts for heritage projects and stage scripts for theatre. She is a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund.

Read Bernie’s most recent short story ‘People in the Wind’ in the Irish Times, August 2024.

Listen to Bernie’s short story ‘At Heart Centre’ read by Seána Kerslake on BBC Radio 4.

Listen to Bernie’s essay ‘Our Art’ (read by the author) on BBC Radio 3.

Listen to Bernie’s short story ‘Waiting for Joseph’ read by Julia Dearden on BBC Radio 4.

Bernie was born in Lavey in County Derry in Northern Ireland. She studied English and Italian at Queen’s University, Belfast and graduated with a Masters degree in Irish Writing. Her novel The Watch House was nominated in 2019 for the Ireland/European Union Prize for Literature and The Butterfly Cabinet was named in 2012 by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes as his novel of the year. Her first short story collection, Sleepwalkers, was short listed in 2014 for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her short fiction has been nominated for numerous awards and in 2008 she won the Zoetrope:All-Story Short Fiction Award in the US. Her work has been anthologised in award-winning collections The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore and more recently in The Black Dreams, Her Other Language, The Danger & the Glory, Belfast Stories and in Female Lines. She is a recipient of a number of Arts Council of Northern Ireland Awards, including an International Artists’ Development Fund Award to attend the Vittore Branca Centre at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in June 2023. She is a former Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) at the Seamus Heaney Centre and at the School of Computer Science, Queen’s University, Belfast and is a current Writing for Life Fellow with the RLF. She offers One-to-one Mentoring for fiction writers via the Irish Writers’ Centre and is available for school visits via Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools Programme. For public readings, writing workshops etc. check out Upcoming Events. You can contact Bernie directly here.

Bernie McGill’s website | X

Books

The Watch House (1 July 2017)

‘There Are Messages In The Air, A Closeness Like The Kind That Comes Before A Storm, A Listening, A Holding Of Breath.’ It Is Summer, 1898, On The Small Irish Island Of Rathlin And The Place Is Alive With Gossip. A Pair Of Strangers Has Arrived From The Mainland, Laden With Mysterious Radio Equipment, And The Islanders Are Full Of Dread. For Native Nuala Byrne, Abandoned By Her Family For The New World And Trapped By A Prudent Marriage To The Island’s Ageing Tailor, The Prospects For Adventure Are Bleak. But When She Is Sent To Cook For Marconi’s Men And Is Enlisted, By The Italian Engineer Gabriel, As An Apprentice Operator, She Becomes Enthralled By The World Of Knowledge That He Brings From Beyond Her Own Narrow Horizons. As Nuala’s Friendship With Gabriel Deepens, She Realises That Her Deal With The Tailor Was A Bargain She Should Never Have Struck.

The Watch House Is A Gripping Story About The Power Of Words To Connect Us, And The Power Of Suspicion To Drive Us Apart

The Butterfly Cabinet (12 May 2016)

You Had A Story For Me… I Wasn’t Ready To Hear It Before But I’ll Hear It Now.

When Maddie McGlade, A Former Nanny, Receives A Letter From Anna, The Last Of Her Charges And Now A Married Woman, She Realises That The Time Has Come To Unburden Herself Of A Secret That Has Gnawed At Her For Over Seventy Years. It Is The Story Of The Last Day In The Life Of Charlotte Ormond, The Four-Year-Old Only Daughter Of The Big House Where Maddie Was Employed As A Young Girl. The Butterfly Cabinet Also Reveals The Private Thoughts Of Charlotte’s Mother, Harriet. A Proud, Uncompromising Woman, Harriet’s Great Passion Is Collecting Butterflies And Pinning Them Into Her Cabinet; Motherhood Comes No More Easily To Her Than Does Her Role As Mistress Of A Far-Flung Irish Estate. When Her Daughter Dies, Her Community Is Quick To Condemn Her. At Last Maddie, And Harriet’s Prison Diaries That Maddie Has Kept Hidden Under Lock And Key In The Cabinet She Has Inherited, Will Reveal A More Complex Truth.

An Unforgettable Story Of Two Lives Linked By A Secret, The Butterfly Cabinet Is A Remarkable Literary Debut.

Short Story Anthologies And Short Stories 

Sleepwalkers: Short Listed For The Prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize For A Single-Authored Collection In 2014. Published By Whittrick Press. Available To Order In Print From No Alibis Bookstore In Belfast.

Darkly Moving And Beautifully Written, Bernie McGill’s Debut Collection Of Short Stories Explores The Lives Of Women Across The Generations. From The Storm-Battered Coastline Of The North Of Ireland To The Sleeping Villas Of Andalusia, McGill’s Characters Grapple With The Consequences Of Affairs, Bereavement, Alcoholism, Illness And Murder.

Compassionate And Quietly Powerful, McGill’s Stories Capture Intimate Moments Of Loss, Love And Healing In A Troubled Age.

The Cure For Too Much Feeling (1 October 2016) Included In The Glass Shore, An Anthology Of Short Stories By Women Writers From The Nine Counties Of Ulster, Spanning Three Centuries. It Is Edited By Sinéad Gleeson And Published By New Island Books, Dublin, In 2016.

Winner Of Best Irish Published Book Of The Year At The Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards 2016.

A Fuss (1 September 2015) Included In The Long Gaze Back, An Anthology Of Short Stories By Irish Women Writers Spanning Four Centuries. It Is Edited By Sinéad Gleeson And Published By New Island Books, Dublin, In 2015.

Winner Of Best Irish Published Book Of The Year At The Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards 2015.

No Angel (10 April 2011) Included In Sleepwalkers & Other Stories, Is Anthologised In The Best British Short Stories 2011, Published April 2011 By Salt Publishing And Edited By Nicholas Royle. It Won Second Place In Both The Michael McLaverty And The Seán O’Faóláin Short Story Competitions 2010, And Is Also Published In Scandal And Other Stories (Linen Hall Library, Belfast, 2010) And In Pigs’ Feet, White Socks & Hoovers (Southword Editions, Cork, 2013).

Home (1 September 2010) Included In Sleepwalkers & Other Stories. It Was Shortlisted For The Bridport Prize And Published In The Winners Of The Bridport Prize 2010.

Family Ties (1 December 2009) Published In Brand Magazine Winter/Spring 2009.

Sleepwalkers (1 December 2008) Is Included In Sleepwalkers & Other Stories. It Was First Prizewinner In The Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest (US) December 2008.

First Tooth (10 April 2006) Is Included In Sleepwalkers & Other Stories. It Was Originally Published, Along With Service Interrupted In My Story, Blackstaff Press/BBC Radio Ulster, Belfast, April 2006, Edited By Pauline Currie.

Epistle & A Still Life (21 November 2005) Published In The Barefoot Nuns Of Barcelona & Other Short Stories, A Collection Of Stories From The Orange Northern Woman Short Story Prize, Greer Publications, Belfast, 2005.

This train is for

This Train Is For: This New Collection, Her First Since 2013, Contains Unpublished Stories Along With A Number Of Previously Published Stories Featured Within Award Winning Anthologies. This Train Is Foris Available To Order From No Alibis Press.

Bernie McGill’s Award-Winning Stories Have Been Widely Praised For Their Emotional Depth And Their Lyrical Language. She Is A Writer Of Profound Sensitivity And Observation. Her Masterful Deployment Of Linguistic Precision And Economy Enables Her To Plumb The Depths Of Human Experience While Neatly Avoiding Sentimentalism.