‘In February, two months to the day after my brother Joe died, a letter arrived. The writing on the envelope was unfamiliar; but my name had been written in my brother’s unmistakable, rickety script on a second sealed envelope inside.’ Lia Mills: Last Words

80 number eighty | Autumn 2020 Buy This Issue

In the autumn issue of the Dublin Review, Lia Mills writes about her late brother Joe, who left Dublin to join the RAF as a young man, largely withdrew from contact with the family ­­– and then staged a series of dramatic returns. Writing with a forensic intelligence underpinned by love, she produces an astoundingly vivid portrait of a lost soul.

Also in the new Dublin Review: Arnold Thomas Fanning listens to his father’s collection of LPs and revisits the moments from his childhood that they evoke; ‘Stuck-still’, a scarifying short story about motherhood by Jane Lavelle; Brian Dillon writes about living in a modernist housing estate in London; and short stories by Caelainn Bradley and Sorcha Hamilton.