Birthdays, by Sive Haughey Lonnra Press, 205pp, £5.99

Only Human and Other Stories, by Jude Collins, Blackstaff Press, 139pp, £6.99 in UK

The extended flashback, bane of novice novelists, strikes again in Sive Haughey's interesting story of a family which is not what it seems. Hugh Staunton, first met as an old man surrounded by his Learesque set of grandchildren, is a retired teacher who has had a seemingly idyllic life with the woman he courted and brought home from Scotland.

The book flashes back to the 1930s, when the villagers are beginning to ask pointed questions about when the patter of little feet is due to be heard, and the parish priest - and school manager - is eager that the Master should show a good example of Catholic fecundity.

When Hugh comes back from hospital with the devastating news that he is irreversibly infertile, the couple have to decide what to do - and since it would not be fair to spoil a good read, that is all that can be said.

Birthdays takes a fascinating, morally indefensible standpoint on the tie between virtue and legitimacy, the connection between acceptance of God's will and later justice between parent and child. It does not express this standpoint overtly but through the story and how the characters act, and this proves a more powerful lever to move the emotions than any editorialising by the writer.

Sive Haughey is from Donegal, and a writer of short stories published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC radio. Her writing is straightforward and rangy, with an unusual command of a story that keeps the reader turning the pages and wanting to know more about her fictional world and its inhabitants.

She has chosen the unfashionable period of the 1930s in rural Ireland, making a paradise of conservative decency and respect out of a time that others might remember with less warmth. Hugh and Teresa in their country teacher's house, painting and making curtains and doing the garden, and bringing up their children with distance and yet kindness, are figures from a generation far removed from most modern readers. But though their dilemma may be unrecognisable to a modern reader, their humanity is not.

Jude Collins's bizarre and irresistible modern North is a world away from Sive Haughey's Ireland. Here we have the man who hears fragments of speech from his dead mother as he does his lengths in the swimming pool; the awkward boy whose only talent is the dancing way he can kick an attacker in the shins; the banished husband whose sight is going and who looks for a cure from the child collecting for Children in Need.

Collins's writing is assured and steady, and at times horribly funny - as in the story of the haemorrhoid operation that wrecks a marriage, or the viciously accurate description of the dancehall: ". . . he sat with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. Sometimes a skirt would brush against his forehead as someone passed. He smoked four of his five Sweet Afton cigarettes, lighting one from the other, dropping each butt on the yellow polished floor and grinding it out with his heel. Each left a fading comet tail of black, where his foot had pulled away."

Jude Collins is a lecturer in education at the University of Ulster, writes a column for the Irish News, and broadcasts on BBC radio; this is his second collection.

His characters and his world view have a desolate feeling, more like that of the sad novels of the 1950s than the gutsy cynicism of modern Irish novelists, but without the bitterness of those Fifties writers. These are sad lives he writes about, but they are the lives of decent people who just happen to live where nobody is very happy.

Lucille Redmond is a fiction writer and journalist