These are the kinds of stories which expose the imperfections which lie beneath a carefully smoothed comforter.

Honest characterization is key, Lisa McInerney explains to Marie Gethins,:

“There is absolutely no element or aspect of their characters’ lives a writer should shy away from presenting, no matter how unpleasant. There’s nothing honest about buffing away ugly but important facets of your characters’ lives so as to appeal to a wider audience or placate publishers.” (Interview here.)

Her “head-in-the-clouds, feet-in-the-swamp apprentice drug dealer” character just won’t let go. (This from an interview which followed her longlisting for the Women’s Fiction Prize.)

Or, is it that she doesn’t want to let him go? “Characters who consistently manage to turn advantage into detriment are bloody fun to write,” she tells Paul McVeigh at The Irish Times.

Ryan Cusack’s story remained unfinished at the end of The Glorious Heresies, and the second novel moves solidly into his perspective (there were five voices in the first novel), and the pacing tightens as readers’ (and the writer’s) comfort with perspective takes hold.

(The quotes below are drawn from both The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles, unattributed and disordered, so as to muddy potential spoilers.)

“Kicked out of school, time under your belt already and a future bright as a bruise” is how Jimmy Phelan describes a young Cusack.

But which one? It could be Ryan’s father, Tony, for readers know about his criminal activities from the start, but Ryan’s involvement ratchets up quickly.

The family connection is at the heart of the story, simultaneusly secure and fragile. “So it is not remarkable that Phelan sought to enlist Ryan, whose apprenticeship was such a notable thing. And it is not remarkable that Ryan was bound to bow under the man whose word is sacrosanct on the streets, especially since the penalty was orphanhood.”

Ryan’s relationship with his father, Tony, is tumultuous. “A couple of times, he thought he might miss his father, kind of like you’d miss a bad tooth or a gangrenous arm.”

Ryan’s mother is dead, but sometimes he imagines she isn’t. “Do you think me talking to you is all forgiveness and fucking love? Naw, it’s not. It’s me telling you. Me telling you.”

His story is largely a story of disconnection, with notable exceptions (for instance, his entanglement with Karine, who has a voice in the first novel and a presence in the second). “They accidentally make eye-contact through the smoke and look away again, like two lights flicked off at the same time.”

Ryan has a story which needs telling. Or, more accurately, one which he needs to hear being told. Largely because he needs to know how it ends.

The story plays out in Cork, which Tony describes with a kind of dark tenderness: “Below him, his city spread in soft mounds and hollows, like a duvet dropped into a well.”

The residents of this “small city of one hundred and twenty thousand souls” live “overlapping lives”, so that either Cusack man shares “a background with people whose deeds are darker than any of his”.

In feeling, it’s not far removed from the fictional setting of Kate O’Brien’s debut in terms of the colours exposed, although O’Brien was writing Without My Cloak more than eighty years ago, and the story spans from 1789 to 1877 in the Considine family.

O’Brien’s 1931 novel was also told in a chorus of voices and ultimately focuses on one woman’s position in the family: “She had one courage, the courage of passion.”

One could argue that this is true, too, of McInerney’s novels. Ryan’s character is engaging partly on his own merit but partly on his connection with Karine early in the first volume. Her passion for him and the push-pull of their connection carries readers’ hearts along in moments when they might be tempted to set aside Ryan’s missteps, electing for easier reading.

Kate O’Brien’s characters dwell on the contradictions of their passions too and the attractions are no more predictable than those in Lisa McInerney’s novels.

Beyond gender, there are expectations resting in class and religion: so many hooks upon which these characters can dangle. “He ought to have known that by her sex and training and tradition she was bound to be either the woman that he did not know, creature of her Church and of her filial and maternal and herd instincts, a piece of her own setting indeed – or else a woman transfigured out of all that setting by passionate love.”

So many themes endure from the 1930s through to the Cusack family story. “There is no way to get tired of a whole life. I thought there was.,” declares one of O’Brien’s characters.

When that’s just what Ryan was hoping, that he could tire of the risk-soaked life of crime he’s leading.

But he should have taken heed of advice given to another of O’Brien’s characters:

That is true, too, for Anakana Schofield’s Our Woman in Malarky. But she, in fact, puts paid to the question of whether one can tire of a whole life. She has, indeed, grown tired of hers.

“She’s between regret and resignation, a nowhere in particular spot.”

Like Lisa McInerney’s novels, the power of the telling rests in the voice. Although Anakana Schofield’s Malarky has a voice all its own. Our Woman’s voice.

“Just because they may think she’s going mad does not mean she’s under contract to deliver it up to them.”

She, too, is determined to expose the whole story, but on her own terms. Even though part of her remains unable to face some parts of it.

Unlike O’Brien and unlike McInerney, whose books run more than 300 pages (O’Brien’s debut is closer to 500, although her later novels are not as long) long, Malarky is concise and spare.

“It’s beautiful when it all makes sense, so it is. Occasionally it makes sense, just for a moment.”

Peering beneath the bedcovers: catching odd moments of sense.