Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 360
Irish Fiction
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe
Hardback; Publishers Recommended Price: 20 Euro. Read Ireland Book Review Special Price: 17 Euro / 21 USD / 13 UK; 240 pages
The intention was, of course, to bring her out to Winterwood - to that magical place that only me and her knew - but I wouldn't tell her that until much later on, for I wanted it to be as much of a surprise as possible. On a return to his home place in the mountainy middle of Ireland, Redmond Hatch meets old Pappie Strange, a fiddler and teller of tales whose honeyed words and giddy reels have persuaded the local mothers and fathers, anxious at the loss of traditional values, to bring their little lambs to his Saturday morning ceilidhs. Once, in Kilburn, married to the sugar-lipped Catherine, and sharing his daughter Immy's passion for "My Little Pony", with its enchanted kingdom of Winterwood, Redmond was happy. But then infidelity, betrayal and the 'scary things' from which he would protect his daughter steal into the magic kingdom, and the bad things begin to happen. Now Redmond - once little Red - prowls the barren outlands alone, haunted by the disgraced shade of Ned Strange. A shape-shifter, Red reinvents himself as Dominic Tiernan, builds a new life in TV, finds a new wife and begins to know domestic happiness once more. Then one day, in Dublin, he spies Catherine again. Like the best old songs and folk tales, this is a story both simple and complex, shot through with recurring themes and motifs, ribbons of song, rags of lore. Full of raucous humour and savage satire, "Winterwood" taps deep into the old, dark, unseen places below the shiny surface of modern Ireland. It is Patrick McCabe's most disturbing, original and accomplished novel yet.
Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle
Hardback; Publisher’s Recommended Price: 25.50 Euro. Read Ireland Book Review Special Price: 21 Euro / 27 USD / 14 UK; 278 pages [Add To Basket]
When we first met Paula Spencer - in "The Woman Who Walked into Doors" - she was thirty-nine, recently widowed, an alcoholic struggling to hold her family together. "Paula Spencer" begins on the eve of Paula's forty-ninth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne. Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job now seem to come from Eastern Europe, and the checkout girls in the supermarket are Nigerian. You can get a cappuccino in the cafe, and her sister Carmel is thinking of buying a holiday home in Bulgaria. Paula's got four grandchildren now; two of them are called Marcus and Sapphire. Reviewing "The Woman Who Walked into Doors", Mary Gordon wrote: "It is the triumph of this novel that Mr Doyle - entirely without condescension - shows the inner life of this battered house-cleaner to be the same stuff as that of the heroes of the great novels of Europe." Her words hold true for this new novel. "Paula Spencer" is brave, tenacious and very funny. The novel that bears her name is another triumph for Roddy Doyle.
Zoli by Colum McCann
Trade Paperback; (Publisher’s Recommended Price: 16.50 Euro) Read Ireland Book Review Price: 14 Euro / 18 USD / 9.50 UK; 278 pages
The novel begins in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s when Zoli, a young Roma girl, is six years old. The fascist Hlinka guards had driven most of her people out onto the frozen lake and forced them to stay there until the spring, when the ice cracked and everyone drowned - Zoli's parents, brothers and sisters. Now she and her grandfather head off in search of a 'company'. Zoli teaches herself to read and write and becomes a singer, a privileged position in a gypsy company as they are viewed as the guardians of gypsy tradition. But Zoli is different because she secretly writes down some of her songs. With the rise of the Nazis, the suppression of the gypsies intensifies. The war ends when Zoli is 16 and with the spread of socialism, the Roma are suddenly regarded as 'comrades' again. Zoli meets Stephen Swann, a man she will have a passionate affair with, but who will also betray her. He persuades Zoli to publish some of her work. But when the government try to use Zoli to help them in their plan to 'settle' gypsies, her community turns against her. They condemn her to 'Pollution for Life', which means she is exiled forever. She begins a journey that will eventually lead her to Italy and a new life. Zoli is based very loosely on the true story of the Gypsy poet, Papsuza, who was sentenced to a Life of Pollution by her fellow Roma when a Polish intellectual published her poems. But Colum has turned this into so much more - it's a brilliantly written work that brings the culture and the time to life, an incredibly rich story about betrayal and redemption, and storytelling in all its guises.
The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien
Large Format Paperback; 14 Euro / 19 USD / 11 UK; 272 pages [Add To Basket]
With THE LIGHT OF EVENING Edna O'Brien returns to the world of her first novel, rural Ireland and the relationship between mother and daughter. Whereas her first novel THE COUNTRY GIRLS was, as she once said, ' a simple little tale of two girls who were trying to burst out of their gym frocks and their convent, and their own lives in their own houses, to make it to the big city', in THE LIGHT OF THE EVENING the mother is dying, her daughter, a writer, is in the aftermath of a rotten marriage. The novel reflects their lives and their relationship down the years. There are moments of lyricism and anecdote, but essentially, as with everything Edna O'Brien writes, it is her understanding of character that wins through. When we meet the mother, now in her seventies, she is seeing her doctor. She knows she is seriously unwell. Ovarian cancer is diagnosed. First the mother tries a faith-healer, but eventually accepts the inevitable and hospitalisation. There she recalls her life: going to America (through Ellis Island), becoming a servant - this historical part is full of good anecdote. The mother marries back in Ireland. Her husband loves training horses; as well as a daughter there is a son, who becomes involved with the IRA and dies. The daughter is sophisticated, she leaves Ireland, marries an older man (is this to escape?), starts reading for a publisher, then writing, has children. Back to her mother in Ireland she sends gifts. As her mother lies dying she returns. The author's understanding of the mother-daughter relationship makes the appeal of this novel universal.
Lover’s Hollow by Orna Ross
Trade Paperback; 12 Euro / 17 USD / 7 UK; 668 pages
Writer Jo Devereux returns home to Wexford for her mother's funeral with very mixed feelings. After all, she hadn't seen Mrs D for years and for good reason. So when Jo finds herself agreeing to her mother's dying request to write a family history, her motives for doing so aren't clear even to herself. Family pride has caused Jo nothing but heartache and cost her Rory, the only man she ever truly loved. But maybe because her life as a sex columnist in San Francisco has become rackety and empty, and because a pregnant woman of thirty-eight needs to face her demons, Jo settles down to a long hot summer of excavating the past. In unearthing undreamt of family secrets of love and revenge in a time of war, of the conflict between happiness and duty, and even of a murder that has haunted three generations Jo begins to understand certain truths, not only about her mother and her grandmother, Peg, but also about herself and Rory, who is still lurking at the edge of her life. Could a reluctant mission to redeem the past actually offer the key to Jo's future?
Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland
Trade Paperback with Endflaps; 14 Euro / 18 USD / 10 UK; 335 pages
John Egan is a misfit, 'a twelve-year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant who insists on the ridiculous truth'. With an obsession for the "Guinness Book of Records" and faith in his ability to detect when adults are lying, John remains hopeful despite the unfortunate cards life deals him. During one year in John's life, from his voice breaking, through the breaking-up of his home life, to the near collapse of his sanity, we witness the gradual unsticking of John's mind, and the trouble that creates for him and his family. Set in early seventies Ireland, "Carry Me Down" is a deeply sympathetic take on one sad boyhood, told in gripping, and at times unsettling, prose. It plays out its tragic plot against a disarmingly familiar background and refuses to portray any of its lovingly drawn characters as easy heroes or villains. (Shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Literature)
Sweetwater by Paul Charles
Hardback; 20 Euro / 26 USD / 13 UK; 281 pages [Add To Basket]
Christy Kennedy is an Ulsterman living in leafy Primrose Hill and working in vibrant Camden Town. He loves the art of detection, he's addicted to the puzzle of the crime. Now, while recuperating from an injury, he is working on a Missing Person case when an acquaintance of his, Harry Ford, is murdered. The investigation uncovers the lives, loves and disappointments of four university friends, one of whom, a Father Vincent O’Connor, may also be involved in the Missing Person case. However, the suspect list goes beyond this group of friends, when Kennedy discovers just how ambitious one of Ford’s work colleagues was. The young and enthusiastic WPC Dot King joins the team as they try to solve perhaps the most complicated murder any of them have ever worked on.
Hellfire by Mia Gallagher
Trade Paperback; 17 Euro / 22 USD / 11 UK; 657 pages [Add To Basket]
One bright summer's morning in 2003 a young woman, Lucy, recently out of jail, sets out on a journey around Dublin, trying to make sense of her troubled life. She tells of the rise and fall, over three generations, of her family, whose businesses were clairvoyance and street-trading, and she recalls the twists and turns that led her into addiction, madness and jail. In particular, she relives her relationship with a charismatic and dangerous young gangster, Nayler, who still haunts her and to whom she addresses her story. Lucy's journey turns into a pilgrimage back to a haunted place and to the worst life of her night. But it may be a pilgrimage that saves her as she finally faces down the ghosts of her past.
Tell Me Your Secret by Deirdre Purcell
Paperback; 9 Euro / 12 USD / 6 UK; 474 pages [Add To Basket]
This is an evocative and dramatic novel told in the voices of two narrators: Violet, who in 1944 was 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?
The Glass Room by Kate Holmquist
Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 18 USD / 10 UK; 339 pages [Add To Basket]
There are two ways Louisa Maguire can look at her life: half-empty or half-full. On the half-empty side there's a husband who's never around, perpetual guilt about short-changing her children and her work, and the craziness of living in boom-time Dublin. And on the half-full side there are the children, a thriving business, wonderful friends and she knows deep down that husband never being around. But on the morning of her thirty-seventh birthday, Louisa decides that there has to be more to her existence than a routine that is frantic but familiar. She needs to live. And she needs to love. Her decision to change her life takes Louisa in extraordinary directions. But when it leads her back to her native New York, and to a summer in the Hamptons when she was seventeen, Louisa must take on the toughest challenge of her life: finally confronting the devastating truth about why she has always put security before passion.
A Place Called Here by Cecelia Ahern
Trade Paperback; Publishers Recommended Price: 19 Euro. Read Ireland Book Review Price: 16 Euro / 20 USD / 12 UK; 388 pages [Add To Basket]
The magical new novel from the number 1 bestselling author of "PS, I Love You" and "Where Rainbows End". Since Sandy Shortt's childhood schoolmate disappeared twenty years ago, Sandy has been obsessed with missing things. Finding becomes her goal - whether it's the odd sock that vanished in the washing machine, the car keys she misplaced in her rush to get to work or the graver issue of finding the people who vanish from their lives. Sandy dedicates her life to finding these missing people, offering devastated families a flicker of hope. Jack Ruttle is one of those desperate people. It's been a year since his brother, Donal vanished into thin air and the sleepless nights and frantic days aren't getting any easier. Thinking Sandy Shortt could well be the answer to his prayers, he embarks on a quest to find her. But, when Sandy goes missing too, her search ends when she stumbles upon the place - and people - she's been looking for all of her life. A world away from her loved ones and the home she ran from for so long, Sandy soon resorts to her old habit again, searching. Though this time, she is desperately trying to find her way home!
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