Category: books
-
Book Review – Mouthing by Orla Mackey
Mouthing is a series of confessional monologues, deftly sewn together, from voices hailing from one village in rural Ireland, which is ‘just about as good and as bad as you’ll get anywhere’. Divided into sections, illuminating different generations and points in time, each section explores a different story or situation from several different perspectives, inching…
-
Book Review – Becoming Marlow Fin by Ellen Won Steil
A storm rages outside Isla’s family holiday cabin by Lake Superior, where she has come with her parents and grandmother Moni. As she looks out into the darkness, the face of a young girl is looking back at her. When the girl turns and runs, Isla darts outside, following without thinking. That fateful night brings…
-
Book Review – The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
It’s 1975 and summer camp at a remote preserve in the Adirondack mountains, Northeastern New York, is drawing towards a close. Then one of the teenagers, Barbara, goes missing. But she isn’t just any camper, she is the daughter of the affluent Van Laar family, whose picturesque lands of forests and lakes around their grand…
-
Book Review – True Love by Paddy Crewe
Keely has grown up living with her Dad and young brother at a caravan camp by the rugged coast, collecting coal from the unforgiving sea and delivering it to locals. When tragedy strikes, Keely’s life as she knows it is upended. Finn has grown up with his grandparents, never having known his parents. Shy, uncomfortable…
-
Book Review – Teddy by Emily Dunlay
Teddy Huntley Carlyle from Dallas, Texas has always dreamed of a glamorous and exciting life elsewhere. So when she meets and marries David, his job drawing them to Rome, it seems like this dream might finally be becoming reality, as she is swept into the heart of the elite diplomatic circles of the American community…
-
Book Review – Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands
14-year-old Cora Mowat is growing up in 1990s Fife, on a council estate in post-industrial Scotland, and life is not easy. It’s just her, her mum who’s in a wheelchair, and her mum’s boyfriends who pass through over the years. Money is scarce, school is a challenge, friendships can be tricky, and things would definitely…
-
Book Review – Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Isla, Irene and Agnes. Three sisters with a fractured relationship and tetchy dynamic, drawn back together after their father’s death. Navigating a city of perpetual rain, where the dead can’t be buried or they will actually rise again, the sisters move through, and exist in, this sodden landscape; a place where the daily produce many…
-
Book Review – The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
Our story begins in 1891 in Butte, Montana, a rowdy mining town high in the Rocky Mountains full of immigrants seeking their fortune, and many Irish among them. Here we meet dope-smoking, hard-drinking Tom Rourke, burdened by premonitions, full of despair and yet clinging to hope; a writer who writes songs for those in need…
-
Book Review – Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg
Restless in life and just out of a relationship, Iris moves back in with her mother. Walking the fields one day, she sees a woman; there is something magnetic, seductive, a bit unkempt about the woman, who she comes to know as Hazel, and who will lead her to Breach House, a rural refuge of…
-
Book Review – Wild Ground by Emily Usher
When we meet Jennifer, she’s working in a London cafe, working hard to leave her past behind her; but when her past walks back into her present, we are taken back to her childhood and adolescence, to a time and place where she was known as Neef, and Neef and Danny were inseparable, until the…
The Resting Willow 