Book Review – Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good tells the stories of Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie, taken from their families as young children to be placed in a church-run residential school. Eventually discharged at different times and sent away on the cusp of an adulthood they are in no way prepared for, their journeys converge…
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Book Review – Cocktail Bar by Norah Hoult
Cocktail Bar by Norah Hoult is a collection of short stories first published in 1950 and, while the language, and social and historical references, sometimes clearly place this in times gone by, there are aspects of the social commentary, and meditations on young love and community dynamics, that could be much more recent. And this…
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Book Review – Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Based on historical facts, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland in 1830. Condemned to death for her part in the murder of two men, with no prisons in Iceland at the time, Agnes is sent to wait out the time leading to…
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Book Review – Florida by Lauren Groff
Florida by Lauren Groff is a strange, atmospheric, unsettling and absolutely captivating collection of short stories. While the book blurb says it’s the landscape, climate, history and state of mind of the titular American State that binds these stories, the overarching element permeating most of this collection is Florida’s extreme weather, terrain and wildlife, used…
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Book Review – Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fresh off listening to Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I loved, I downloaded the audiobook of Half of a Yellow Sun, which won her the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2007. This was also read by Adjoa Andoh, who read the last one so beautifully. Half of a Yellow Sun, set in 1960s Nigeria,…
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Book Review – Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. Out he went. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is a bold and vibrant novel exploring the lives of eight very…
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Book Review – Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong
Falling Animals is a novel that reads as a finely woven series of linked stories that are all part of one greater story, a chorus of voices each adding a piece of the puzzle in the mystery of an unidentified dead man who appears on the beach of a seaside town; each character in some…
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Book Review – Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson opens at the beginning of a hot summer that will change everything for our narrator, Stephen, and his friends; school is finished, capturing that moment between childhood and adulthood with all its uncertainty and potential, and the future is both frightening and exciting. By the end of this summer…
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Book Review – A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop
A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop is a collection of short stories that capture the devastation of lives and landscapes, the losses suffered and the voids created, the fear of the immediate future and the hope for healing, following a series of Australian bushfires. The searing heat, the smell of smoke and the taste of…
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Book Review – Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a moving story of a love tested by time, distance and circumstance, but it’s also so much more than that. At 17 hours audio/around 400 pages, this is a sweeping and epic novel embodying so much and exploring so many themes; love, identity and personal evolution, the different relationships…
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Book Review – Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy is, at its heart, a story about an ill-fated love affair but its beauty and strength is that it becomes so much more than that, painting a rich and vibrant portrait of a whole community beyond our two lovers. This story is about an unexpected and forbidden love between young Catholic…
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Book Review – Devotion by Hannah Kent
Why do men bother with churches at all when instead they might make cathedrals out of sky and water? Better a chorus of birds than a choir. Better an altar of leaves. Baptise me in rainfall and crown me with sunrise. Devotion by Hannah Kent begins in 19th century Prussia, in a small community of…
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Book Review – Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
This is our dancing time. It’s 1978, and Yamaye and her friends live in a small, industrial town on the edge of London, once a site of pagan rituals, where they dance with the dead. This town of cemeteries and ghosts is brought to life at the weekend by the dub reggae beats in an…
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Book Review – Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns
Your Driver is Waiting is a razor sharp and darkly comic vision of a contemporary city, viewed through our RideShare driver Damani’s eyes as she cruises through it, its inhabitants’ lives flashing before her. This unnamed city is heaving with people, simmering with an undercurrent of threat, and wracked with protests and riots. Driving long…
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Book Review – The Colony by Audrey Magee
It’s the summer of 1979, and an English painter and a French linguist both travel to a small island off the West Coast of Ireland where Irish remains the primary spoken language. What follows is a beautifully written and layered exploration of the idyllic and mythologised view they each hold of this place, versus the…
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Book Review – A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò
A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò is a novel that illuminates and explores, with great candour and heart, two very different sides of modern Nigeria. Wúràolá, a young doctor from a wealthy family, is weighed down by the punishing hours and strained environment of her job, and the pressure from her family and…
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Book Review – The White Rock by Anna Hope
The White Rock by Anna Hope is an epic journey bringing us backwards and forwards in time through four different story lines, unfolding decades and centuries apart, loosely bound together by the powerful Mexican landscape within which they take place, and by the echoes that run through them. The Writer (2020), the Singer (1969), the…
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Book Review – Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days. It’s 1964 in wintry New England, and Eileen does not have it good. Living in a run-down house with her alcoholic father – a bully she mostly despises but remains dutiful too – Eileen is a young woman who drapes and drowns herself in…
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Book Review – Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a story of two parts and two worlds, a story that encapsulates two very different sides of Haruki Murakami’s writing. One part: a Tokyo muchly similar to contemporary Tokyo but with a cyber twist, where our narrator lives a life typical to all Murakami’s male narrators…
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Book Review – Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton
Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton is a dynamic and compulsive multigenerational story that moves back and forth in time and place, between mother Sook-Yin and daughter Lily, between Hong Kong and London, spanning four decades from the 1960s to 1990s. It’s a story of love and betrayal; of the struggles of dual-heritage identity; of…
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Book Review – Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah
When Efe and Sam meet in 1990s London, Efe is burdened by the expectations of her parents, who sent her to London from Ghana in hopes of a better future, while Sam is consumed by his studies in pursuit of a career in law. They come and go from each other, in ebbs and flows,…
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Book Review – Avalon by Nell Zink
Avalon by Nell Zink is a quirky and satirically philosophical coming-of-age novel with a resilient underdog as its narrator. Bran is not having it easy; with a dysfunctional family and unusual upbringing, she was abandoned by first her father and then her mother, one for the promise of Australia and the other for the promise…
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Book Review – I Wanted To Be Close To You by Katie Oliver
I Wanted To Be Close To You by Katie Oliver is a collection of darkly humorous and sharply written short stories exploring the female experience in particular, written at a snappy pace that perfectly suits their short length. In fact, these stories are so short – some merely a page long – that they emerge…
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Interview – Paper Visual Art
At a time when the Irish cultural scene is alive and kicking with predominantly literary journals, PVA is an initiative which has carved out a very special place of its own. With its origins as an art journal, it has since evolved into a space where contributions on visual art, contemporary culture and literature sit…
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Book Review – Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and we burned it and it’s gone now. Written in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison is a novel that merges science fiction and the dystopian with detective story and a little bit of a love story thrown in…
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Book Review- I, Antigone by Carlo Gébler
It’s fair to say that most stories are never as straightforward as they might initially seem, and we seem to be living in a heyday of readapted and reimagined stories from antiquity, with a focus on revealing new perspectives and unleashing unheard, or even silenced, voices. Inevitably, the female voice is now often placed centre…
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Book Review – The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo
The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo, billed as a classic Japanese murder mystery, is a tale about a family fortune, a family feud and family secrets, revolving around the explosive, divisive and extremely complex will left by Sahei Inugami, patriarch of the Inugami Clan. When Detective Kindaichi gets a tip-off that the old man has…
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The Resting Willow 