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Book Review – The Island of Longing by Anne Griffin
One afternoon, Rosie looks out from an upstairs window as her teenage daughter Saoirse approaches home on her bike. Stepping away to finish up a few tasks before making her way down to greet her, Rosie is met only by her son when she gets downstairs. Saoirse’s bike is lying outside at the side of…
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Book Review – Kala by Colin Walsh
We’re perched on our bikes at the top of the hill. There’s a turning melt of sky above us. The town’s glittering below. We’re fifteen and it’s the summer of our lives so Kinlough is gathering itself up into the moment with us – the whole town’s pure responsive to our energies. The year is…
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Book Review – The Break
A young woman holding her baby at night looks out the window into the darkness and witnesses what she believes to be a devastating act of violence occurring on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house. Moving back and forth in time, The Break by Katherena Vermette…
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Book Review – Julia by Sandra Newman
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. When I first read George Orwell’s 1984 back in school, I was part terrified, part mesmerised, and absolutely captivated by Orwell’s capacity for capturing this chilling vision of a future, totalitarian world presided over by the ominous and omnipresent Big Brother. So when I read…
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Book Review – The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
The Wren, The Wren is a story of three parts, three people: Nell, a young woman in search of adventure, her mother Carmel, and Carmel’s father Phil, the famous poet. Moving back and forth in time, between characters, between first person narrative and third, this multi-generational novel explores love, sex, the complexities and messiness of…
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Book Review – The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
In her prologue, Vanessa Chan tells us that The Storm We Made is inspired by her grandparents’ generation’s reluctant stories about the period 1941 – 1945 in Malaya (now Malaysia) known as the Japanese Occupation. Unfolding through four perspectives – that of Cecily and her three children Jujube, Abel and Jasmin – this is a…
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Book Review – One Friday in Napa by Jennifer Hamm
Deep in the Napa Valley, a story of past and present unfolds. When Vene learns that her mother Olivia is nearing death, she reluctantly returns to her family home, only to find her mother as cold and difficult as ever; but when Vene discovers an old cookbook, filled with revelatory notes, a whole new side…
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Book Review – The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
A strange, strange tale so full of hardship but also balanced by moments of real beauty. There is starvation, disease, punishing cold, desolation, violence and sublime but unforgiving terraines, but also startling moments of clarity, of profound realisation, and deep connection with the natural world. The story opens with our protagonist, known for most of…
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Book Review – Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a story told to us by our narrator Kathy in 1990s England, as she looks back on her adolescence beginning in a picturesque, rural boarding school. As the reminiscing begins, and unfolds, this could be any adolescence; the friendships, in particular with her best friends Ruth and…
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Book Review – Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff
A nightmare vision of Dublin with only whispers of the city as we know it, Silent City is a world of warrior women called banshees, foul and terrifying beings called skrake that fall somewhere between the living and the dead, breeders, wallers, farmers, and shanties, all ruled by the ominous and brutish management. Inside the…
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The Resting Willow 