Fergus Cronin’s sublime short stories of lives half-lived in the shadow of death

Death makes an appearance in 11 of these 14 stories, yet it’s an anthology teeming with life. And although death takes various forms – including murder, suicide, euthanasia, military combat and plain old natural causes – life for most of the central characters is lived in a state of corrosive loneliness, something Kurt Vonnegut once described as “the terrible disease”.