Tag: book blogger
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Book Review – Fight Night by Miriam Toews
Fight Night by Miriam Toews is an exuberant and compelling story about three generations of women, living together in a house in Toronto which is loud, chaotic and full of cursing but, at its heart, brimming with love. Our nine-year-old narrator Swiv lives with pregnant Mom and elderly Grandma. When Swiv is expelled from school…
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20 Books of Summer ’22
The Challenge 20 Books of Summer is an annual online reading challenge hosted by Cathy Brown of 746books.com, whereby you select a list of 20 books (a great way to make a dent in that ever-growing TBR pile) that you will read, and review, within the time frame (June 1 – September 1 2022). This…
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Book Review – Actress by Anne Enright
Actress by Anne Enright is a beautifully conjured portrait of the life of Katherine O’Dell, fictional star of the stage and screen, as told by her daughter Norah. As Norah is coming to terms with the more difficult later years of her mother’s life, and is approached by a student looking to tell Katherine’s story…
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Interview – One Dublin One Book 2022 – Nora by Nuala O’Connor
One Dublin One Book is an annual initiative, celebrating reading for pleasure, which encourages everyone to read the same book during the month of April. A Dublin City Council initiative, led by Dublin City Libraries, the chosen book is traditionally a book connected in some way with the capital city and, to complement this synchronised…
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Book Review – I Want To Know That I Will Be Ok by Deirdre Sullivan
I Want to Know That I Will Be Ok (Banshee Press, 2021), Deirdre Sullivan’s first book for adults, is a collection of beautifully strange, engrossing and unsettling short stories. Her short stories have already been published in literary journals and the Irish Times, but she is perhaps best known for her award-winning books for children…
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Book Review – Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson
“I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles.” Constellations: Reflections from Life (Picador, 2019) is the debut book by Sinéad Gleeson,…
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Book Review – The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903 – 1991) was first published in English in 1960, having been translated from Yiddish. In the author’s note of my copy, Singer thanks his editors who ‘for years have encouraged me in the difficult task of introducing Yiddish writing to the American reader’. I found this…
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Book Review – Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin
All we have is ourselves. All we have is family. Dinner Party: A Tragedy, the debut novel by journalist, author and playwright Sarah Gilmartin, is a novel which is honest with us, and warns us from the beginning that we are going to be taken on a bumpy ride. It tells the story of a…
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Book Review – A Quiet Tide by Marianne Lee
The fisherman sidled up to her on the quay. ‘You’re Miss Hutchins, the plant lady from Ballylickey.’ A Quiet Tide, the debut novel by Marianne Lee, takes us back in time to the early 1800s, immersing us in an intimate and compelling fictionalised account of the life of Ellen Hutchins, Ireland’s first female botanist. After…
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Interview – Burning Books Podcast by Books Ireland
Books Ireland is our national hub for all things literature, covering the literary scene from pretty much every angle possible: news, interviews, features, reviews, Irish book charts, events listings, First Flash (a roundup of books published in the current month) and, most recently, a series entitled Backlist Beauties, giving books a well deserved return to…
The Resting Willow 