Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 403 - 2 February 2008
Irish Fiction and Poetry
With My Lazy Eye by Julia Kelly
Hardback; 15 Euro /23 USD / 11 UK; 224 pages
`Julia Kelly's is surely the freshest voice in Irish fiction since the wonderful early novels of Edna O'Brien. This is a future to watch.' - John Banville
This remarkable first novel releases the voice of Lucy `Bunty' Bastonme as she makes her journey through adolescence in 1980s Ireland. Intensely focused, prismatic and delicately nuanced, the internal flight of the narrator finds expression in closely observed snapshots from a family album. At its core with my lazy eye is an exploration of father love in which the patriarch of a Dublin bourgeois Catholic household becomes ever more elusive and distant and his daughter ever more muddled, myopic and needy. Bunty makes discoveries about her father that free her from the prison and shelter of a protracted childhood. A new vision is won as she steps away from the past towards the light, metamorphosed. This is a quirky, poignant coming-of-age story like no other.
"With My Lazy Eye" tells the story of Bunty, a myopic, muddle-headed little girl and her relationship with her distant father. As she stumbles her way through childhood and teenage years - failing exams, losing tennis matches, fighting with her father, falling in and out of love, longing for his attention - her eyesight deteriorates and her father becomes ever more elusive. A chance discovery about her father's past changes the course of her life and her attitude towards him forever. A metamorphosis begins, but it's possibly too late..."With My Lazy Eye" is a funny, poignant and highly original portrayal of one girl's coming of age.
Lessons in Heartbreak by Cathy Kelly
Trade Paperback; 16 Euro / 24 USD / 12 UK; 432 pages [Add To Basket]
The new novel from the international no. 1 bestselling author. Izzie Silver left the small Irish town of Tamarin behind her for life in New York. She's big, beautiful, and dreams of her own model agency for plus-sized women (what her grandmother would call healthy.) Life is good -- but she's just broken one of her cardinal rules and fallen for a married man. On the other side of the ocean, Izzie's aunt Anneliese discovers the pain of infidelity for herself. Her husband Edward has been having an affair with her best friend, Nell. Devastated and angry, Anneliese is facing the realisation that she is now alone. When Lily, the matriarch of the family is taken ill, the family must put their own problems aside. Izzie, intrigued by her grandmother's past begins to discover things she never knew about wise, calm Lily. Annaliese feels despair build as Lily, the one person who could have helped her, starts to slip away. And the lessons each of the women learns -- past and present -- bring both joy and heartbreak. Lessons they will carry with them forever.
Tell Me This is Normal: New and Selected Poems by Julie O’Callaghan
Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 166 pages
Tell Me This Is Normal is a generous selection of Julie O’Callaghan’s poetry, ranging from the Edible Anecdotes her readers gorged on in the 1980s to her most recent work confronting a very ‘scary’ 21st century with an armoury of lively and defiant language – as well as a baseball bat under the bed. She is a singularly acute observer of human behaviour, with a sharp Swiftian eye and an alert ear that have made her one of the finest and funniest practitioners of the monologue in poetry. Yet, notably in the poems charting her father’s illness and death, she can also strike an elegiac and heartbreaking note, while her poems set in the court of Heiain Japan unscroll with great poignancy and delicacy. Among the most admired poets of her generation – whose work has been championed by Wendy Cope, George Szirtes, Selima Hill and Carol Ann Duffy – Julie O’Callaghan writes poems which ‘seem effortless and are immediately accessible and yet achieve great emotional weight by the lightest of means’ (Michael Hartnett Award citation).
‘These poems are agile, heartfelt and original. They expand with repeated readings, earning the reader’s trust as they echo voices that are recognisable all around us, if not within us as well’ – Leslie Ullman, Poetry (Chicago)
‘O’Callaghan’s subtle ear for the intonations of speech, her appalled delight in the things language is made to do in our consumer-crazed era…and her shrewd handling of line-endings mark her as a true poet, someone with an almost deranged interest in the possibilities and impossibilities of words’ – Patrick Crotty, The Irish Times
Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland, 1850-1922 by Caitriona Clear
Trade Paperback; 24 Euro / 30 USD / 15 UK; 200 pages [Add To Basket]
Men and women who were born, grew up and died in Ireland between 1850 and 1922 made decisions - to train, to emigrate, to stay at home, to marry, to stay single, to stay at school - based on the knowledge and resources they had at the time. This, the first comprehensive social history of Ireland for the years 1850-1922 to appear since 1981, tries to understand that knowledge and to discuss those resources, for men and women at all social levels on the island as a whole. Original research, particularly on extreme poverty and public health, is supplemented by neglected published sources - local history journals, popular autobiography, newspapers. Folklore and Irish language sources are used extensively. All recent scholarly books in Irish social history are, of course, referred to throughout the book, but it is a lively read, reproducing the voices of the people and the stories of individuals whenever it can, questioning much of the accepted wisdom of Irish historiography over the past five decades. Statistics are used from time to time for illustrative purposes, but tables and graphs are consigned to the appendix at the back. There are some illustrations. An idea summary for the student, loaded with prompts for future research, this book is written in a non-cliched, jargon-free style aimed at the general reader.
The River Field by John MacKenna
Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 316 pages
One of Ireland’s finest writers here follows his magnificent and critically acclaimed memoir, Things You Should Know, with a collection of short stories, set over the centuries and bound by one mitigating the factor – a field near his beloved Athy, Co. Kildare. Each story showcases MacKenna’s incredible gift of capturing a moment, an emotion, a time in sensuous yet stark language. Oft likened to the late John McGahern, this wonderful collection of one of the true art forms – the short story – is further proof that those comparisons are richly deserved.
Brandon 25 edited by Steve McDonagh
Paperback; 5 Euro / 7 USD / 3.50 UK; 286 pages
Celebrating 25 years of fiction publishing, this anthology brings together the work of 25 authors: writers of today, such as Emer Martin, Willian Wall and Ken Bruen; and classic Irish writers such as Bryan MacMahon, Walter Macken and John B. Keane. Both Irish and international writers are featured in a wide-ranging, stimulating collection which makes a unique introduction to some of the best modern fiction.
Dulse by Frank McGuinness
Paperback; 12 Euro / 18 USD / 9 UK; 70 pages [Add To Basket]
Dulse is the taste of the Atlantic Ocean and these poems have its savour and strength. In settings as diverse as Korea and Donegal, historic Antwerp and contemporary Wyoming, this poetry is restless, exuberant and fierce.
‘I met a man / who met his fate / on Five-fingered Strand’ – the poems in Dulse, Frank McGuinness's fourth collection, are suffused with the aura of myth and folk tale. (Also available in hardback, priced at 20 Euro)
Laugh at Gilded Butterflies: A Selection of Favourite Poems chosen by Ulick O’Connor
Hardback; 20 Euro / 30 USD / 15 UK; 190 pages [Add To Basket]
In this selection by some of the world's finest poets, Ulick O'Connor has chosen poems that he feels 'could bring a flash to the reader's mind'. Poets selected include those from a wide variety of genres - Irish and non-Irish, household names and the relatively obscure - and Ulick also provides a short paragraph on each poem, its background and author. A beautiful gift book, "Laugh at Gilded Butterflies" will be a treasure for any reader of poetry and, as Ulick notes, 'many will experience that special delight brought to mind by a true poem'.Poets to be featured include Mathew Arnold, E.E. Cummings, Alfred Lord Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, Oscar Wilde, Robert Front, Eva Gore Booth, Oliver St John Gogarty, Hilaire Belloc, William Wordsworth, Brendan Behan, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Parker, Rupert Brooke, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell, Edgar Allen Poe, Patrick Kavanagh, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Patrick Pearse, Muhammad Ali, and many others.
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe
Paperback; 10 Euro / 14 USD / 7 UK; 242 pages [Add To Basket]
Once, in Kilburn, married to the sugar-lipped Catherine and sharing his daughter Immy's passion for the enchanted kingdom of winterwood, Redmond Hatch was happy. But then infidelity, betrayal and the 'scary things' from which he would protect his daughter steal into the magic kingdom, and bad things begin to happen. Now Redmond - once little Red - prowls the barren outlands alone, haunted by the disgraced shade of Ned Strange, a fiddler and teller of tales from his home in the mountainy middle of Ireland.
Please note: Prices were correct at time of original posting but are subject to subsequent change without notice.
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