Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 340
Irish Fiction and Poetry
The Rebels of Ireland (Ireland Awakening) by Edward Rutherford
Large Paperback; 18.00 Euro / 24.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 868 pages
The Princes of Ireland, the first volume of Edward Rutherfurd’s magisterial epic of Irish history, ended with the disastrous Irish revolt of 1534 and the disappearance of the sacred Staff of Saint Patrick. The Rebels of Ireland opens with an Ireland transformed; plantation, the final step in the centuries-long English conquest of Ireland, is the order of the day, and the subjugation of the native Irish Catholic population has begun in earnest.
Edward Rutherfurd brings history to life through the tales of families whose fates rise and fall in each generation: Brothers who must choose between fidelity to their ancient faith or the security of their families; a wife whose passion for a charismatic Irish chieftain threatens her comfortable marriage to a prosperous merchant; a young scholar whose secret rebel sympathies are put to the test; men who risk their lives and their children’s fortunes in the tragic pursuit of freedom, and those determined to root them out forever. Rutherfurd spins the saga of Ireland’s 400-year path to independence in all its drama, tragedy, and glory through the stories of people from all strata of society--Protestant and Catholic, rich and poor, conniving and heroic.
His richly detailed narrative brings to life watershed moments and events, from the time of plantation settlements to the “Flight of the Earls,” when the native aristocracy fled the island, to Cromwell’s suppression of the population and the imposition of the harsh anti-Catholic penal laws. He describes the hardships of ordinary people and the romantic, doomed attempt to overthrow the Protestant oppressors, which ended in defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and the departure of the “Wild Geese.” In vivid tones Rutherfurd re-creates Grattan’s Parliament, Wolfe Tone's attempted French invasion of 1798, the tragic rising of Robert Emmet, the Catholic campaign of Daniel O’Connell, the catastrophic famine, the mass migration to America, and the glorious Irish Renaissance of Yeats and Joyce. And through the eyes of his characters, he captures the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the great Irish nationalists and the birth of an Ireland free of all ties to England.
A tale of fierce battles, hot-blooded romances, and family and political intrigues, The Rebels of Ireland brings the story begun in The Princes of Ireland to a stunning conclusion. (Also available in Hardback priced at 30 Euro)
Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre
Trade Paperback; 14.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 317 pages [Add To Basket]
DBC Pierre's second novel charts the unlikely meeting between East and West that follows Ludmila Derev's appearance on a Russian brides website. Determined to save her family from starvation in the face of marauding Gnez troops, Ludmila's journey into the world and womanhood is an odyssey of sour wit, even sourer vodka, and a Soviet tractor probably running on goat's piss. Thousands of miles to the West, the Heath twins are separated after 33 years conjoined at the abdomen. Released for the first time from an institution rumoured to have been founded for an illegitimate child of Charles II, they are suddenly plunged into a round-the-clock world churning with opportunity, rowdy with the chatter of freedom, democracy, self-empowerment and sex. A wild and raucous picaresque dripping with flavours of British bacon and nasty Russian vodka, Ludmila's "Broken English" is a tale of tango-ing twins on a journey into the unknown. A ride so outrageously improbable it just may happen, DBC Pierre's second novel confirms his place in the ranks of today's most original storytellers.
An Irish History of Civilization volume Two by Don Akenson
Hardback; 40.00 Euro / 50.00 USD / 30.00 UK; 696 pages
'Some of these stories are accurate; all of them are true...' In his "An Irish History of Civilization", Don Akenson, the world's leading scholar of the Irish Dispora, fuses history and fiction into a remarkable narrative of the people and their influence around the globe. "An Irish History of Civilization" is about the Irish at home and abroad, the great and the small, the noble and the depraved, the saints and he sinners, adventures and idealists. As Akenson follows his chosen people on their odyssey around the globe, the lines between history and fiction become irretrievably, beguilingly lost in the mists of time. Volume Two begins with the Great Famine and goes on to show the Irish adapting, improvising and innovating in Ireland and overseas - in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia and South Africa. The book ends by demonstrating the centrality of both Catholic and Protestant Irish culture to the United States.
The Lightning Tree by P J Curtis
Paperback; 16.00 Euro / 20.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 275 pages [Add To Basket]
This is a haunting novel based on the life and voice of an old "wise woman" and healer. The year is 1954. The place is the Burren, a wild, rugged limestone region on the west coast of Ireland. This is a world of old customs, strong traditions and deeply-held religious and social values. It is also a pagan place, of ghosts and spirits, old beliefs and superstitions. In this time and place lives Mariah, an old woman of considerable powers, the last of a long line of renowned healers. Some say her power is a gift from God; others that it comes from the devil, that she is a witch. In this unique novel a voice from the past speaks with remarkable contemporary relevance. Mariah's views are refreshingly alternative at a time when we may be coming full circle to an appreciation of old healing arts and the concept of contentment with a simpler life.
The Picture She Took by Fiona Shaw
Hardback; 21.00 USD / 26.00 UK / 16.00 UK; 342 pages
How far will a man go in war? And how far will a woman go to bring him back? In a bombed-out village, on the Western Front, Jude nurses the wounded in her cellar hospital. War is the making of her, and she records all she can, taking photographs of everything, capturing life in the midst of death. Survivor of a very different conflict, Daniel has come home from Ireland a haunted man. Signed up to the hated Black and Tans, he is disfigured by a campaign he fought in but didn't understand. A few years later an innocent photograph exposes an extraordinary tale. A chance snapshot, two soldiers sharing a cigarette, brings together Jude and Daniel and propels them on a strange journey. People travel a long way from themselves in battle and some never return. This searching, beautiful novel is about the wars we wage against others and against ourselves; it is a powerful story of memory, flight and desire.
Tell Me Your Secret by Deirdre Purcell
Large Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 342 pages
A powerful and thought-provoking novel about women's lives from the high-profile journalist and writer. An evocative and dramatic novel told in the voices of two narrators: Violet, who in 1944 is imprisoned in the tower of a rambling country house by her family; and Claudine, a modern-day property negotiator who becomes involved in handling the sale of the derelict Whitecliff in 2004. Violet's story is of young innocent love for a local lad taking an unfortunate twist, while Claudine is a thoroughly twenty-first-century character: daughter of a loving father with a less loving stepmother, she marries in haste after her father's death, and is at a turning point in her life when she starts to find out the true story of Violet. Is happiness a possibility for these women in their separate and very different worlds?
Pretending by Caroline Williams
Large Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 9.00 UK; 390 pages [Add To Basket]
Martina is in love with Cuan. Eleanor used to be in love with Cuan. In fact, sooner or later, everyone falls for Cuan. But Cuan knows he can't fall in love with anyone, and he wishes people would stop looking for something he can't give. Now Eleanor is on the verge of falling in love with someone who isn't Cuan, but she still can't stop herself obsessing about him. And Martina can't bring herself to fall out of love with him either. Sooner or later Cuan is going to have to come clean about why he won't do what comes naturally to everyone else. And they're all going to have to learn that true love doesn't follow any rules. "Pretending" is a tender and addictive story of love, secrets, confused identities and learning to see people for who they really are not what they pretend to be.
The Knack of Life by Trisha Rainsford
Paperback; 9.00 Euro / 12.00 USD / 6.00 UK; 370 pages [Add To Basket]
Thirty year-old Seamus can't believe his eyes when he sees his friend Mattie being killed. It just doesn't make any sense, but then not much has to Seamus ever since his lovely wife ran off with another man. Then two feisty women drag Seamus out of his torpor, and into some impromptu detective work. His investigations will lead him not only to the truth about Mattie, but also into the mysteries of his own head and his heart. And lead him to wonder if he'll ever figure out the knack of life ...
Aisling Ltd. By Sean Harnett
Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 250 pages [Add To Basket]
Businessmen are the new revolutionaries’ is the mantra of Lawrence Cooley, the founder of Dublin-based IT consultancy Aisling Ltd. When Eoin Cullen is hired to take ownership of Aisling’s corporate story, he soon finds himself won over by Cooley’s brand of messianic capitalism. But there’s at least one malcontent in the ranks who thinks Aisling’s philosophy is 'f**king new age hoodoo voodoo', and Cullen slowly becomes aware that there’s more than meets the eye to the firm’s office politics.
Object Lessons by Eavan Boland
Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 272 pages [Add To Basket]
'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be. In turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.' In "Object Lessons" Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood in the specific places and times of her life. She engages, in a scrupulous and evocative prose, the issues of nationhood as well, clearing a space within Ireland where to be a woman and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. The book functions in her work as Wordsworth's "Prelude" does in his, though Boland does not allow herself the luxury of rapture: to say no more or less than she means, she focuses on particulars, on 'obstinate details' that contain and represent larger meaning, connection and force. The autobiography here is not of a confessional kind: the facts which connect with other voices, other lives, matter. What the London Review of Books called Boland's 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' informs all the related meditations in "Object Lessons", an enabling document of our time. Unease with Modernism, a concern with the erotic in time, and at every point a sense of continuities, mark the book as a portrait of a critical imagination of deep integrity finding a way among history's obstacles, finding itself in and through the lessons of the objects - particularly artifacts and poems - that it encounters.
A Perfect V by Mary O’Malley
Paperback; 14.00 Euro / 17.00 USD / 9.00 UK; 100 pages [Add To Basket]
The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, and of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live by dies, and the ramparts that shore up our existence are demolished. A marriage breaks down, children leave home, love itself is questioned. What is home now? Where is it? And how do we live when we cannot return? The personal is examined through the lens of the greater human chaos. This is a book about eviction, an examination of the nature of home that is both private and political, written out of a sense of the barbarism that threatens to overwhelm the deep song of Ireland.
Collected Poems of Greg Delanty
Paperback; 22.50 Euro / 27.50 USD / 15.00 UK; 256 pages [Add To Basket]
This volume brings together twenty years of the acclaimed Irish poet's work. Each of Greg Delanty's six books so far published is an entity in itself, a single-seeming movement. Bringing the books together in a single volume, juxtaposing them as it were, reveals the enormous resourcefulness and wit of this unusual poet who keenly interweaves material and themes drawn from his reading, writing and living (there is no real line between them). Marriage, childbirth, friendship, landscapes Irish and Indian and American, real and imagined, politics, the personal and private and the public...we are organised as a word and a line and a stanza are made from a tray of type, as in a tapestry the unseen sewing happens and holds, as in growth a foetus evolves into a child. Things fall apart, too, and there is pattern and method in that process as well. The poems draw on a rich inheritance from the different worlds that Delanty moves in: Ireland and America, Gaelic and English, traditional verse forms and modern colloquial. Past and future, their people and places, inform and interpret one another.
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