Love Minus One Whether we are eavesdropping on the imaginative Saturdays of a Portugese cleaning lady or living through a divorced woman's search for the elusive orgasm, Norma Harrs manages in this collection of short stories to absorb the essence of her narrator's psyche with the clarity of a good actress who gets under the very skin of her characters. "Love," either the absence of or the yearning for, is the theme that links the stories in this collection together. Love for a family member, a friend, a lover, or a husband, and sometimes the lack or reciprocity, is the element that gives the stories poignancy and force. The variety in these stories keeps the reader always guessing. The author doesn't limit us to the easy answers, but brilliantly provokes us to enlarge our own landscape. A Certain State of Mind Author Sarah Caldwell has returned to her family home in Ireland to promote her new novel when a chance encounter with a former lover brings about profound changes in her life. Norma Harrs' vivid description of social turmoil in modern Belfast acts as a backdrop to Sarah's personal struggle with the conflict arising from her role as wife and mother and the rediscovery of herself as a woman and lover. 'A Certain State of Mind,' is a story of love and a woman's determination to know the truth about herself. Where Dreams Have Gone Dreams vanish in most of the masterful stories that make up Norma Harrs' new collection. A young Irish girl falls in love with an older married professor and has her first date with heartache; a middle-aged woman attends her niece's wedding and drunkenly surveys the wreck of her own life and love affairs; a young woman admires her kind and beautiful neighbour so much that she is almost drawn into a not so innocent profession… Adversity, sometimes disaster, befalls Norma Harrs' characters, but instead of destroying these people, it often miraculously enriches their existence, bringing them a sudden awareness of what had been wrong with their lives and inspiring them to make a fresh start. Ms. Harrs seamlessly weaves together plot and evocative detail, wildly funny turns of events and inconsolable sadness; her stories' earthy eroticism, their startling vivid dialogue and, above all, their breathtaking original rendering of suffering and joy will remain with the reader long after the final page.