Product Description

Maria has just arrived in Dublin. Staying with her aunt, Maria decides to move out, so she answers an advertisement pinned up in the students' union. She finds herself sharing a flat with Ruth and Jael, two older, more sophisticated, feminist women, who she eventually realizes are lovers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #465528 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Realistic, fun and tender
The book is a tender and witty study of a young student's first encounter with lesbian/gay life. Set in the context of modern Dublin it deals with issues of growing up and of sexuality in a pleasantly light but perceptive way. My only problem with it was that sense of lightness, perhaps insubstantiality. This isn't a book about Big Emotions, and though it is about what goes on emotionally under the surface and in everyday life (and in my book, wins points for not being into the kind of uplifting magical fantasy some lesbian authors like to get into), I did feel somehow that I would have liked a longer, deeper book. However, that's exactly what Donoghue's second book, Hood, provides.

A really funny intelligent read - with a surprise ending
I really enjoyed reading this book. Its a bit more intelligent than many of the romance novels in this genre.

Basic plot is that a naive Irish country girl ends up sharing a flat with a lesbian couple. The story is extremely funny in places and it reminded me of my own college days. The flat mate reassesses her own love life and comes to realise that her own lack of romantic success is because she is also gay. Eventually she realises that her feelings for one of the flat mates is more than friendship.

Well worth a read - warning NOT sexually explicit!!!

A favourite book
Stir-Fry is one of those books that, once I start reading it, that's the rest of the evening gone; it has an emotional undertow that's hard to resist. (And I'm not even a woman, let alone a lesbian.) It's a beautiful study of what it's like to be young and confused, even if Donoghue occasionally lashes the symbolism on with such enthusiasm that it's like putting too much oyster sauce into the wok. It has some sly things to say about the links between sex and eating (rather more than the title and chapter-headings suggest) and, apart from its other virtues, it was one of the first novels to present late Eighties Dublin flatland in all its shabby, pretentious, movie-postered domesticity. Not the deepest book she's written, but a charmer.