Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 265
New Irish Fiction
Dublin Foundation by Edward Rutherford
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 32.00 USD / 18.00 UK; 776 pages
This great Irish epic reveals the story of the people of Ireland through the focal point of the island's capital city. The epic begins in pre-Christian Ireland during the reign of the fierce and powerful High Kings of Tara, with the tale of two lovers, the princely Conall and the ravishing Deirdre, whose travails echo the ancient Celtic legends of Cuchulainn. From the stirring beginnings, the author takes the reader on a graphically realised journey through the centuries. Through the interlocking stories of a powerfully imagined cast of characters - druids and chieftains, monks and smugglers, merchants and mercenaries, noblewomen, rebels and cowards - the reader sees Ireland through the lens of its greatest city.
The author vividly and movingly portrays the passions and struggles that shaped the major events in Irish history. The mission of St. Patrick; the coming of the Vikings, who founded the port of Dublin; the glories of the great nearby monastery of Glendalough, and the making of treasures like the Book of Kells; the extraordinary career of Brian Boru; the trickery of King Henry II which gave England its first foothold in medieval Ireland: all these set the stage for the great conflict between the English kings and the princes of Ireland and the disastrous Irish invasion of England which incurrred the wrath of King Henry VIII. The book, the first in a two-part Dublin epic, draws to a close in the Reformation, at a major turning point in Irish history, with the ceremonial burning of Ireland's most holy relics.
The Swing of Things by Sean O'Reilly
Trade Paperback with Flaps; 16.50 Euro / 20.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 302 pages [Add To Basket]
Noel Boyle needs a new life and he has come to Dublin to find it. He dreams of transformation and renewal. But as he struggles to overcome his loneliness and to keep despair at bay his attempts at change seem futile and almost comic. One thing offers the possibility of salvation: a woman. Boyle starts a relationship with Eleanor, who is beguiling yet remote, playful yet serious in her suggestion that he return to England with her. Can he take the chance or will it be the excessive street-poet Fada who, by tempting hum back into the violence of his past, will determine his future? All the while the face of a young woman pulled from the Liffey haunts his mind and awakens an ancient rage in his gut … Ablaze with stories of lives lived and lost, this novel is a darkly beautiful meditation on the idea of escape and what it is that keeps us tethered to the world.
The Taoiseach by Peter Cunningham
Hardback; 20.00 Euro / 23.50 USD / 16.00 UK; 355 page
In Ireland, in the second half of the twentieth century, a corrupt circle of politicians and shadowy business figures control the levers of power. Lucrative property deals involving the sale of government assets are secretly financed by Middle Eastern oil dollars in exchange for Irish passports. Planning corruption is practiced as a matter of course. Political donations are rewarded with access to offshore bank accounts as the ordinary people of Ireland are forced to tighten their belts. As the heart of this web of deceit and intrigue is the Taoiseach, the Irish prime minister, Harry Messenger. A survivor of the political turmoil of the late 1960s, Messenger has now seized control and nothing is allowed stand in the way of his hold on power or his voracious lifestyle. This novel is a powerful story and a topnotch political thriller that shows modern Ireland as never before.
A Moth at the Glass by Mogue Doyle
Small Hardback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 223 pages [Add To Basket]
In Springmount, County Wexford, Will is watching Kate Kelly while she finishes her chores. As darkness gathers, and Kate moves from the milking shed of her smallholding into her house, the ghosts of Will's past do likewise. A moth at the glass, he watches them through the window and, as the strains of St. Anne's Reel fill the kitchen, Kate and her brother Philly begin to dance on the newly laid floor, while old Mrs. Kelly watches from beside the fire. Desperate to understand how the terrible tragedy in his past can haunt his present, Will looks back to the 1920s: a halcyon time in which romance and mad expectation beckoned. It was also a period of great change and tension, wherein the traditional order was giving way to a new political awareness and the ties of family and friends no longer held so much sway. As much a meditation on time past as it is a love story of two young people who are meant to be together, this is a lyrical and emotive novel that recreates a time just after the Irish Civil War, when mountain lads roamed country lanes, loaded pistols in their pockets, and when innocence and romance were corrupted by a physical passion that ran all too deep.
Elvis, Jesus and Me by Emer McCourt
Small Hardback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 15.00 UK; 212 pages
Ger wants to be a boy but Jesus isn't having any of it, which begs the question: if God can send a man to the moon why can't He turn her into a boy? And if He can't, does He even exist and who cares anyway when Elvis can sing 'Jail House Rock' as sweetly as any virgin and help Ger to forget her worries about whether she'll burn in hell for kidnapping an alter boy or for showing her knickers to the world … Ger and her younger brother Seany - two different peas in one freshly plucked pod - ask and answer, watch and wait, move and shake their way through tool sheds, wakes, dangerous weapons, chippolatas, the Holy Trinity and the O'Rowe sisters' guide to life and love, in a world where conversations with Neil Armstrong colour their young lives with wisdom that can only come from the stars … Endearing and bitingly bittersweet, this novel marks the wonderful debut by an extraordinary new young Irish writer.
The Captain with the Whiskers by Benedict Kiely
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 32.00 USD / 18.00 UK; 292 pages [Add To Basket]
In Bingen House, guarded by shale-white Ulster mountains, and on the edge of the Atlantic, lived Captain Conway Chesney: a small, neat, efficient and diabolical domestic tyrant. Owen Rodgers, son of the local doctor, a kind father and a man of music, came one day to look at the sheepdog trials on the wide green before Bingen House. There in the early morning he peered down from a stable loft into the farmyard and discovered the evil secret of Bingen. Thereafter the house and its owner possessed him like a perverted love, and his story became the story of the Conway Chesneys.
This novel is an extraordinary study of a psychopath and of the terrible consequences of his life and death. Originally published in 1960, it is one of the most compelling novels the Irish writer has ever written. This new edition includes and Afterword by the novelist and playwright Thomas Kilroy.
The Master by Colm Toibin
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 32.00 USD / 18.00 UK; 360 pages [Add To Basket]
In this brilliant and profoundly moving novel, the author tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London. In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.
The author captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.
The Master is Colm Toibin's most accomplished and powerful novel to date. It is a portrait of a man who was elusive to both friends and family even as he remained astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art - a searching exploration of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart.
Another Kind of Life by Catherine Dunne
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 12.50 USD / 7.00 UK; 480 pages [Add To Basket]
Hannah, May and Eleanor are sisters. Their early life in Dublin, with the middle-class parents, has prepared them for a comfortable future of marriage, children and servants. Further north, Mary and Cecilia are also sisters. They are struggling to make a living in the linen mills of Belfast, amid rising political tensions. The lives of all the sisters are destined to unfold in ways that none of them could ever have imagined. This novel is the intricately crafted tale of how their lives entwine, against the backdrop of the rapidly changing Ireland of the late nineteenth century. In the novel the author returns to the themes of family ties, love and loyalty, which she has delineated so finely in her earlier work. But this time, she opens out her canvas to tell a much wider story. Perceptive, absorbing and beautifully told, the novel is an unforgettable portrait of a family, and of Ireland, which stays with the reader long after the last page.
Gregory Carr, Bookseller
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