Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 237
New Irish Fiction
Number 5 by Glenn Patterson
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 17.50 UK; 308 pages [Add To Basket]
One house, five families, four and a half decades; from the 1950s to the present. In this compelling, engaging and deeply moving novel, the successive occupants of a three-bedroomeed terraced house go about the complicated business of keeping themselves and a home together in a place that the rest of the world knows as Belfast, but to them is just 'the town'. Things happen that might happen anywhere, and things happen that could happen nowhere else, sometimes as noises off, and sometimes on the front doorstep. But whatever happens, they get up the next day, like everyone else, and carry on.
There is Stella, haunted by the thought that she will die young, like her mother, and unfulfilled; Rodney, clinging to the dream of a cosmopolitan life; young Tan, faced with the dilemma of where he begins and friendship ends; Catriona, watching her husband and children undergo a strange transformation; Mel, pushing thirty, living with Toni, wondering whether they will ever share more than ownership of an industrial vacuum cleaner. And always, across the street, there is Ivy. One family moves out, another moves in. This novel is about continuity and renewal in the face of life's disruptions. It is about the traces that, sometimes without our knowing, we leave behind.
Eight Ball Boogie by Declan Burke
Trade Paperback; 13.99 Euro / 17.50 USD / 9.50 UK; 248 pages [Add To Basket]
'Imelda Sheridan was dead, which was tough cookies on Imelda, but then every silver lining has its cloud. My job was to find out who and why, at 12 cent per word for the right facts in the right order … which is how it all started out, anyway.' Harry Rigby likes a smoke, the easy life, and Robert Ryan playing the bad guy in late night black-and-whites. Sweet. But when the wife of a prominent politician is murdered in her best nightie, Rigby finds himself caught in a cross-fire between rogue paramilitaries, an internal garda inquiry and the heaviest blizzard of coke ever to hit the northwest. If all this wasn't bad enough, his relationship with girlfriend Denise is on the rocks and he's hitting the bottle. Then there's Rigby's psychotic brother Gonzo, back on the streets and meaner than a jilted shark … Flashing with razor-sharp wit and edgy, face-paced plotting, this novel is an enthralling page-turner that marks the debut of a potent new talent in Irish crime fiction.
The State of Grace by Catherine Donnelly
Trade Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 17.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 253 pages [Add To Basket]
During the course of just a few weeks, 46-year-old Grace is fired from her job as a TV producer in an advertising agency, loses her house, falls off the wagon and watches her mother die. She learns how to smoke cigarettes, hotwire a car and that riding pillion on a motorbike at 150kph is a lot more exhilarating than HRT. She finds friendship with an Amazonian Russian, has sex for the first time in ten years with a younger man, gets to know her children as people, starts a new career and rediscovers her sense of humour. In short, she finds her state of grace.
How It Ends by Dan Collins
Trade Paperback; 17.00 Euro / 18.50 USD / 11.50 UK; 250 pages [Add To Basket]
Following a stint as a Las Vegas showgirl and an early botched marriage, Lee Annis, at twenty-eight, has finally found some definition and success as part of Anaconda, the band she fronts alongside the enigmatic Billy. But all is set to change as Billy announces that he's about to marry and pull the plug on Anaconda and his life with Lee.
Over the course of a restless summer, Lee moves between London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Rome and Berlin in a way that mirrors her childhood spent traversing the Continental Divide, itinerant the length of the Rockies. Lost in the Badlands of fame and glamour, radically detached from any obvious moral lodestar, Lee rediscovers a hapless instinct for misadventure. Unable to shake off the bizarre, sometimes macabre, grip of the past, she resorts to the usual analgesics of sex and drugs, and finds herself betrayed and abandoned by those she has known the longest and loved the best. As Lee probes the true nature of her complex, troubled relationship with Billy, she finds herself wishing there were some men in the world that are not the men she always meets.
With emotional acuity and dark, ferocious humour, this novel chronicles a life spiralling out of control. It is an original and brave novel from one of Ireland's most inventive writers.
The Magdalen Martyrs: A Jack Taylor story by Ken Bruen
Paperback; 13.99 Euro / 15.50 USD / 9.50 UK; 310 pages [Add To Basket]
Jack Taylor, traumatised, bitter and hurting from his last case, has resolved to give up the finding business. However, he owes the local hard man a debt of honour and it appears easy enough: find 'the Angel of the Magdalen' - a woman who helped the unfortunates incarcerated in the infamous laundry.
He is also hired by a whizz kid to prove that his father's death was no accident. Jack treats both cases as relatively simple affairs. He becomes involved with a woman who might literally be the death of him, runs dangerously foul of the cops. He is finally clean and sober but the unfolding events will not only shake his sobriety but bring him as close to death as he could ever have imagined.
As in previous Jack Taylor stories, 'The Guards' and 'The Killing of the Tinkers', the city of Galway berates, cajoles, torments and enchants him at every confused step he takes, as he is about to discover the true meaning of martyrdom.
Turning Turtle by Denise Deegan
Paperback; 11.00 Euro / 12.50 USD / 7.50 UK; 382 pages [Add To Basket]
Kim Waters seems to have it all: her own PR agency, a loving husband and two perfect children. In her charming home, everything seems picture perfect. But Kim is beginning to feel a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction with her life …
Deciding that she's fed up writing snazzy press releases and never seeing her children, Kim takes her courage in both hands and throws in her job. Turning her back on 12-hour days, she is looking forward to long, lazy walks with the children and to writing a wonderful novel that everyone will want to publish. But the dream turns rapidly sour: the novel is a tired cliché and life as a domestic supergoddess isn't all it's cracked up to be …
Seasons by Anna Dillon
Paperback; 10.99 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.50 UK; 587 pages [Add To Basket]
Dublin in 1900 is seething with discontent; poverty, disease and prostitution are rife, fuelling the flames of nationalist rebellion. Amidst this turmoil, a young fresh-faced English girl arrives to take up her new position as maid in the family of the cruel but magnetically handsome Englishman, Captain Lewis … Katherine is instantly attracted to the charismatic officer, but she soon realises he is not quite what he pretends to be. She is wracked with further agonising doubts when she meets Dermot Corcoran, a patriotic young journalist, and discovers he is also hot on the captain's trail. And as the nationalist rebellion gathers pace, Katherine finds herself desperately trying to escape from an ever-tightening noose of conspiracy and deception. But, in Captain Lewis, she may have met her match - not only in love but in the deadly game of life itself.
Angels by Marian Keyes
paperback; 10.00 Euro / 12.00 USD / 8.50 UK; 472 pages [Add To Basket]
This novel is a captivating tale of Maggie Walsh and her antics in L.A., city of valet parking, ten varieties of low-cal mineral water and where a run on Ben & Jerry's ice cream would be termed a crime wave. Unlike the rest of her family, Maggie has always done the right thing - that is, until the day she leaves her husband and takes refuge with her friend Emily, a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Soon Maggie is doing things she 's never done before, such as wearing sunglasses in the shower, lighting fires for film stars, pitching scripts to studios, and more. Including meeting the mysterious Troy, a man so non-stick he's known as Human Teflon. This book follows Maggie on her irrepressible journey of discovery, from suburbia to suntan, taking in some heartache and lots of martinis along the way.
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