Chestnut Street, by Maeve Binchy

An uneven collection of vignettes featuring the residents of fictional Chestnut Street in Dublin.  Some are perfect little gems, some not as successful.  According to her husband, Binchy wrote the stories over the course of decades, always with the intention of eventually weaving them into a book.  After her death, her editors gathered 36 of the stories together and published them, making some perplexing things, like the use of the same name for wildly different characters understandable.