Maeve Binchy is back. In exuberant fettle and fine form, she's returned to the bestselling bookshelves that everyone feared she'd forsaken for retirement. Quentins, her new book, is one for her fans worldwide to really get into: another joyful, absorbing Binchy read with lots of heart.
With storytelling in her bones, it was never on the cards that Binchy would retire altogether from writing. She has, of course, given up her column for this newspaper. She's also stopped writing big novels and, as a consequence, stopped doing the world promotions she found were no longer the fun they used to be.
What she hasn't given up is writing short stories. Which is how we come to have Quentins, a series of linking stories featuring characters old and new with the restaurant of the title at their pivotal centre. Its real heart, though, is Dublin. As so often in the past, Binchy shows the city we all know is a village to be just that; a place where everyone knows everyone and no one's secrets are safe.
Quentins could have been a novel. You can almost feel the storyteller pulling back from the long run, stopping instead to give us the minutae of individual lives in all their drama. Ella Brady's story, at the book's core as much as Quentins itself, might have taken over if Binchy hadn't made her restaurant such a power. But we're in safe and vintage Binchy-land and Quentins, drawn from humble beginnings, becomes the force majeure and a character in its own right. This a restaurant to kill for, the one we all want on our doorstep.
Stylish and welcoming, it serves the very best of food, has a staff you'd want to move in with and a clientele who make the act of dining a theatre experience.
It's also a timeless community centre, a place where characters come together and part over decades and where, in the end and in the kitchen (and without giving too much away), we have resolution and joy unfettered.
Also, piling joy upon joy, there are no mobile phone calls allowed in Quentins.
Everyone in these pages, even those with walk-on parts, has a story. Take Fennel, a New York dog whose owner tells us "he never belonged to anybody. He was born in some alley. His mother may have been killed. He lived by his wits until he found me. He's a survivor, Fennel. He found one of the few men in New York who would look him in the eye and then pay for him to live in luxury for the rest of his life."
Though the telling covers a few decades, this is a very contemporary book, taking a look (and some gentle swipes) at the new, economy-driven Ireland. The desolation and ruin caused to the blameless by corrupt financiers is a theme; celibacy and childlessness are also touched upon. As it grows and goes through change, Quentins and its clientele become, in many ways, a metaphor for the Ireland that moved with such turbulence through the latter end of the 20th century and on into 2002.
The reassuring side of Binchy's Ireland is that friends never desert each other. Just as goodness triumphs, so too are friends always on hand when needed. Work is another constant, paying the bills and moving life along to a - usually better - place. And, in her always satisfactory way, Binchy rewards good and punishes evil.
Quentins is not unlike a set-dance, going backwards and forwards as its people connect, step together for a while, part to go a bit of the road with others. People survive by getting on with things, doing whatever it takes to come through triumphantly.
Binchy is good on partings:
Quentin Barry had bought his mother an elegant hat and told her that she had the finest cheekbones in Dublin. He had taken his father for a long walk out by the sea and commented on the elegant boats and the good state of the Irish economy. He held their hands a little longer than usual when he said goodbye, but not so much longer that they might get suspicious.
When he left the restaurant . . . anyone close enough would have heard him say . . . that he was leaving it in good hands.
With her art for making it seem so effortless, the short story is in a capable place in Binchy's hands.
Quentins. By Maeve Binchy. Orion, 345 pp. £17.99 sterling
Rose Doyle's last novel, Friends Indeed, was recently published in paperback. Her new novel, Fate and Tomorrow, will be published by Hodder and Stoughton this month