This is Joyce's first book and as such is much easier going than Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It is a series of short stories about, oddly enough, the citizens of Dublin. If you are a Joyce novice it is a good place to start.

It concerns Joyce's ongoing interest in religion, sexuality, complex family relationships and what it is to be Irish. Each story apart from the final two, Grace and The Naming of the Dead are short snapshots in time, glimpses into the lives of ordinary people.

There is not really much narrative thread. We dip in and out of their existence and consciousness, share their worries, look through their eyes, experience their world and then leave as abruptly as we arrived.

The stories are tender and brutal by turn, waxing philosophical at one moment and then describing a drunkard falling face first into excrement in another. The descriptions are vibrant and realistic, shocking at the time of their publication and a herald of things to come.

The tales can sometimes be a little obscure. Times have changed and because of the nature of the narrative there is little explanation of things that at the time would have perhaps been ordinary daily events, but which to a modern reader may seem arcane. These are to be read and savoured for the atmosphere that Joyce is so skilful at creating and the impending sense of melancholy and fervent spirituality that infuses all of the stories.

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