Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 345
Irish Fiction
The Sea by John Banville
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 260 pages
This title is the winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize. When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared there, in that long-ago summer, as if from another world. Mr. and Mrs. Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins, Myles and Chloe, who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow. Praise for "The Sea": 'With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. "The Sea" [is] his best novel so far ...Banville's prose is sublime' - "Daily Telegraph". 'This is a novel in which all Banville's remarkable gifts come together to produce a real work of art, disquieting, disturbing, beautiful, intelligent, and in the end, surprisingly, offering consolation' - Allan Massie, "Scotsman". '"The Sea" is a beautiful novel, challenging and richly rewarding ... It is a comfort to know that we have a lord of language among us' - Gerry Dukes, "Irish Independent".
The Human Season by Louise Dean
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 374 pages [Add To Basket]
It is December 1979. Kathleen's son Sean has been convicted of a crime on behalf of the IRA and sent to Long Kesh prison - newly renamed the Maze. John Dunn has just taken up a job as a prison guard after leaving the army. Both will be shocked at what they find. Both will try to do the right thing, and fail. Neither will ever be the same again. Louise Dean's sensational new novel deals with one of the most explosive and morally complex incidents in recent British history. "This Human Season" is a powerful, confronting, humane, and blackly funny examination of the lives of ordinary people when placed in the vice of history.
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 291 pages
One of the most vivid and realised characters of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of Sebastian Barry's highly acclaimed novel. Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising. Profoundly moving, intimate and epic, "A Long Long Way" charts and evokes a terrible coming of age, one too often written out of history.
The Secret Life of E. Robert Pembleton by Michael Collins
Large Paperback; 14 Euro / 17 USD / 11 UK; 355 pages [Add To Basket]
It's been over a decade since Robert Pendleton published his brilliant short story debut, and his hopes for a dazzling literary career now lie in tatters. Hanging on to his tenure in literature at Bannockburn college by the slimmest of threads, Pendleton's simmering despair boils over with the arrival on campus of his one-time friend, now nemesis, the bestselling author and king of the coffee-table book, Allen Horowitz. For Pendleton, death seems to be the only remaining option, but his attempt to kill himself is wrecked by the intervention of Adi Wiltshire, a graduate student battling her own demons of failure and thwarted ambition. Whilst Pendleton recovers from his suicide attempt, Adi discovers a novel hidden in his basement: a brilliant, bitter story with a gruesome murder at its core. The publication of Scream causes a storm of publicity, a whirlwind into which Adi and Horowitz are thrust - along with the sister of a young girl whose real-life, unsolved murder bears an uncanny resemblance to the crime in Pendleton's novel and a burnt-out cop with secrets of his own, who is determined to prove that in this case fact and fiction are one and the same.
The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes
Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 17 USD / 11 UK; 350 pages
The night of my mother`s funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband. Now she was lying dead on her living room floor, and the howl of a police siren echoed through the surrounding hills…`
Ed Loy hasn`t been back to Dublin for twenty years. But his mother is dead, and he has returned home to bury her. He soon realizes that the world waiting for him is very different from the one he left behind all those years ago.
`Tommy said you found people who were missing`, Linda Dawson tells him the evening of his mother`s funeral. Linda`s husband has disappeared. She doesn`t want the police involved. So reluctantly, Loy agrees to investigate.
And suddenly in this place where he grew up – among the Georgian houses, Victorian castles, and modern villas of Castlehill – Loy finds himself thrown into a world of organized crime, long-hidden secrets, corruption and violence. And murder.
The Free and Easy by Anne Haverty
Trade Paperback; 16.00 Euro / 19.00 USD / 11.00UK; 282 pages
A wealthy American is burdened by a recurrent dream about his native Ireland, a country that had long ceased to interest or trouble him. Convinced that the Irish are asking him for help, he equips his errant grand-nephew, Tom Blessman, with a generous bank account, and dispatches him to the old country to offer assistance. In Dublin, Tom is bewildered to find a city thronged with glossy, happening people and an economy in overdrive. The Irish apparently want for nothing. As Tom attempts to make sense of it all - and to resolve his own personal history - he falls in with a fascinating gallery of characters, some of them super-rich, some trying to make their way in this opportunistic new world, and others pinning their hopes and ambitions to art, literature and 'heritage projects'. Central to this alluring scene is the sprawling Kinane family, especially Eileen, the lost soul of the family, whose waif-like beauty Tom pursues through the city's bars, art galleries and parties, becoming ever more entangled with the dangerous Irish merry-go-round. Teeming with brilliant characters, clamorous with the life of Dublin's pubs and cafes, and the atmosphere of its streets, "The Free And Easy" is a hugely entertaining and mordant take on Ireland past and present from one of Ireland's most stylish and interesting writers.
Divided Loyalties by Patricia Scanlan
Hardback; 17 Euro / 21 USD / 12 UK [Add To Basket]
Shauna and Greg's marriage is under pressure. She wants another baby. He doesn't. She also has to endure her obnoxious in-laws, 'The Freeloaders', Della, Eddie and their spoilt kids. They arrive at her home at the drop of a hat, stay as long as they like, and eat and drink all around them without lifting a finger to help. Shauna's glad to be moving abroad - she'll be free of them at long last. But three thousand miles won't stop the determined Della, free holidays in an exotic location. Perfect! Carrie, Shauna's sister, can't help feeling put upon. The burden of looking after their elderly, hypochondriac father rests on her and she's fed up of it. Is it too much to ask that the burden be shared? Resentment builds, even though she loves her siblings, Can Carrie put her foot down and stand up for herself? Bobby, the youngest, has a poisoned relationship with his father who blames him for the premature death of his wife. A bitter confrontation leaves them estranged. Can they ever settle their differences? Or are some rifts just to painful to resolve? The last Christmas the family got together was a disaster, but circumstances change. Can the family turn things around and finally put the past behind them as they prepare for another family gathering?
Restless Spirit: The Story of Rose Quinn by Margaret Hawkins
Trade Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 288 pages [Add To Basket]
'And then there was Rose...' - five little words that catapulted Wexford woman, Patricia Quinn, into a dedicated search for information about the great-aunt she never knew. Rose Quinn died in an asylum less than a year after being committed. Such was the stigma attached to having a relative in the asylum that Patricia's father, John Quinn, only told her about this shortly before he died. In the course of subsequent research, Patricia was shocked to discover many coincidences between her life and Rose's. There was also an unexpected spiritual connection between Rose and Patricia's daughter, Catherine, that was to result in finding Rose's burial place - a plot behind the asylum, now known as St Senan's Hospital. This fascinating book interweaves the search for information about Rose with a reconstruction of her life in novel form. Rose Quinn had to become a restless spirit to have her story told. This is it.
The House by Leland Bardwell
Paperback; 11 Euro / 14 USD / 7 UK; 150 pages [Add To Basket]
The House tells the story of Cedric Stewart, who returns from post-World War I London to visit his dying father at the family home near Killiney, County Dublin. Divorced, and estranged from his Anglo-Irish parents with their ‘stiff Protestant notions’, he finds solace once more in Theresa, the Catholic housekeeper whom he has adored since he first knew the meaning of love. Through flashbacks to his childhood and to previous visits to the house with which he has a love-hate relationship, Cedric tries to recover a sense of his own place in the world. Originally published in 1984, a classic of Irish fiction.
Don’t Move by Margaret Mazzantini
Paperback; 11 Euro / 14 USD / 7 UK; 263 pages [Add To Basket]
Timoteo: high-flying career as a surgeon, beautiful wife, luxurious apartment, villa by the sea - he seems the epitome of success and glamour. But then his daughter falls off her scooter and is rushed to the hospital in a coma. A colleague operates on her head injuries and, while the agonised Timoteo awaits the outcome, he holds the reader in the vice-like grip of his confession. For, beneath the veneer of his apparently charmed life, there is a story of squalor, degradation, deceit and strange passion. The story of a doomed love affair with a woman who, from the moment Timoteo meets her, undermines everything he thought he knew about himself. Mazzantini's chilling portrait of a supremely self-assured man losing control has taken readers by storm across the world. Highly atmospheric, subtly disturbing, it keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout. In the end, the suspense of wondering whether Timoteo's daughter will live is overtaken by the question of deciding just how much pity her guilty father deserves.
This second novel from the Dublin born author has won numerous awards including the prestigious Italian Strega Prize.
Where They Were Missed by Lucy Caldwell
Large Paperback; 14 Euro / 17 USD / 10 UK; 230 pages [Add To Basket]
It is Belfast in the 1980s and Daisy and Saoirse are living through the hottest summer ever. The yard is too hot, their mother keeps flying off the handle and their father doesn't come home until late. Things aren't improved by the neighbourhood children who call them names and leave nasty things on their doorstep. Police sirens whine through the streets at night and Daisy asks why they can't have a mural painted on their house like the other houses down the road. As the two girls dream of ice creams from Antonini's and the characters from their bedtime stories, it's clear that their parents are struggling with each other and the political violence outside that is forcing them ever closer together and yet is also smashing them apart. Then one day a tragedy occurs and life changes for good. Ten years later Saoirse is in Gweebarra Bay in Southern Ireland, living with her aunt and uncle, far from the sadness of her childhood in Belfast. She has managed to hook a good-looking local lad and is preparing for the school dance. But there is still an aching absence in her life and soon she will discover that her extended family is holding the secret to what really happened when she left her childhood home. "Where they were Missed" is a moving meditation on the beauty and sadness of northern Ireland as political violence bleeds into everyday life but above all it is the story of an ordinary family, about children and marriage and how loss can help us grow up, but also can undo us.
Gregory Carr, Bookseller
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