Kitty Donovan, a dressmaker in the time of the Irish war of independence, arrives on the opening page of this book fully formed. It is 1919. She does not seem invented. You hear her voice in your head – insistent, opinionated, revved up – and long to hear her speak aloud for this poetic monologue is just begging to be performed. Martina Evans’s outstanding book needs to be taken on as a radio piece without delay – or, perhaps, put on stage. Its second half belongs to another Irish woman, Babe Cronin, who, like Kitty, vents about life, but times have now changed and it is 1924. Babe is a stenographer in London who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary and their monologues are intertwined because Eileen, the woman with whom Babe has fallen in love, once lived and sewed with Kitty, an orphaned apprentice.

I loved everything about this book: its tragicomic shambles of an opening involves a husband lost and found (is he a vision, a side-effect of the laudanum to which Kitty is hooked?) alongside a mislaid hat. “After twelve years/Could he have clambered out the other/side of Sullivan’s Quay that night in Cork/ran away fast with his bowler under/his arm? We never found the hat although/Eileen Murphy and myself searched high/and low, tearing the damp walls, our hands/bright green from the moss.”

There is a garrulous humanity and humour in Evans’s writing – her women are both spendthrift talkers. I was diverted by the furious zest with which the bible is co-opted into Kitty’s tale. She links the possibility of her reprobate husband’s return to an unwitnessed resurrection. “How many times did he fall down and rise again like an India rubber ball?/And what was there to stop him rising/again? The body wasn’t found and no one/saw Jesus rise on Easter Sunday either.” The sense in this book is that words will save you – but only up to a point. Laughter, on the other hand, might prove no laughing matter.

There is much gaiety: descriptions of clothes are offered with relish – how precisely a wardrobe mistress could be guided (Mrs Pym’s crimson dressing gown, Flora’s “Indian yellow dress”, or her “three-quarter-length smashed strawberry coat”). But Evans also explores the tension between control and the lack of it in a time of terror: Kitty is, along with every other woman, at the mercy of circumstance with scissors, laudanum and her tongue as weapons. As mistress of threads, she sees her sewing basket as an arsenal with a selection of sharp scissors. The narrative is quaintly punctuated, too, by the products of yesteryear: Wrixon’s Linctus, Boland’s biscuits, Spinet Smoking Mixture. And it is well supplied with gossip. When Captain Galway shows up, he seems likely to be a cad, too slow and stately to be a bounder. But what exactly are his intentions with young Flora?

By the beginning of the second half, there is a sense of Irish whispers. In the first part, Kitty announces: “It is a hard fact that not one of us can see ourselves from the outside.” But it may be a mercy in that Kitty’s portrait, in the second section, is not flattering. Babe’s narrative is pinched, fearful and, relatively, strapped for words. There is a monochrome rigour to her monologue in contrast to Kitty’s colourful first, but the ending is witty, sad and spot-on. On her deathbed, Eileen’s words seem to hark back to the book’s title: “Mrs Donovan taught/me darning and fancy darning. I could/do the Peacock’s Eye but all I darned was/men’s socks and they were always on the run.”

• Now We Can Talk Openly About Men by Martina Evans is published by Carcanet (£9.99). To order a copy for £8.49, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (an extract)

Then the man disappeared from the post box.

The ground around it was empty for days.

My scissors swam like a dolphin with relief.

I flew through tissue paper, cutting patterns.

I even put my hand on the red post box

like it was a friend who had come back to me.

When no one was looking. I was careful.

No one would do business with a mad woman.

I traced the crown & the letters of Royal Red.

Eileen Murphy said that we would have

our own post boxes soon, green ones instead of

red.

I’d imagined something magnificent like

a pure Peacock hue until she showed me

the colour on a bachelor’s gate

on the road to Quartertown. Pure disgusting.

A horrible dark green like an old leaf

of cabbage you’d see a snail on top of.