Tag: debut novel
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Book Review – I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan
When Áine’s flatmate Laura moves out to move in with her boyfriend, the natural progression is for Aíne to move in with her boyfriend Elliott. So begins the stressful search for a place to call home. They can’t believe their luck when they find a place, just about in budget, in a trendy neighbourhood; but…
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Book Review – Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh
School is done for seventeen-year-old John Masterson, living on an island off Ireland’s west coast. The summer holidays loom ahead, full of potential and the uncertainty of what comes next. John is determined to make his mark on the football pitch, if he could just find his place in the team and play in the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Book Review – Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald
Jean is a gentle young girl growing up in 1970s and 1980s Dublin, living with her authoritarian and volatile father, her mother and siblings. She has a loving relationship with her mother until a new pregnancy leaves her exhausted. Jean’s solace at home is in her baby brother John and kind but meek Aunty Ida,…
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Book Review – The Divorcées by Rowan Beaird
It’s 1950s America and Lois, in her 20s, is making her way west. Stuck in a loveless marriage, Nevada’s laws will allow her a quick, clean divorce. All she has to do is be resident there for six weeks. So she spends her weeks at the Golden Yarrow, one of the more upmarket ‘divorce ranches’…
The Resting Willow 