Written over the course of ten years, while the author has been living in America’s northeast and southeast, Mary O’Donoghue’s stories in The Hour After Happy Hour reach into the wounds of immigration, transit, and exile. Here are modern, surreal dilemmas of rootlessness and failed returns. Here are people in their middle years struggling to be considered, let alone understood, in the fearsome day-to-day of the twenty-first century. Here too are the borders and battlefronts between parents and children. In each of these stories language is a first and last resort, and every sentence holds the force of fate.