Like many of the great Irish writers before him, Dermot Healy first announced himself as a writer of intricate and innovative short stories. Healy's stories are set in small-town Ireland and its rural environs, and in the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities in London. Throughout these texts, Healy demonstrates a deep sense of compassion towards the marginalized and the dispossessed, without ever becoming sentimental or cliched. The language is earthy and imagistic by turn, and he continually seeks to extend the formal boundaries of the genre.Gathering all of Healy's stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama Before the Off and Healy's final short works, Along the Lines and Images.