Tag: Irish authors
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Book Review – The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway
When Oisin’s mother Brigid’s health begins to decline, he is drawn from Brazil back to Ireland with his wife and young daughter. As they work at building a new life, and he seeks to reconnect with his mother who has early onset Alzheimer’s, the faces and places around him begin to stir up echoes from…
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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 – Cork Stories
Cork Stories is a collection of contemporary short fiction set throughout Co Cork in Ireland, from the urban spaces to coastal towns and most rural corners, by writers who live in, or have some strong connection to, Cork. I love this concept for a collection, taking one place and viewing it through a variety of…
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Book Review – May All Your Skies Be Blue by Fíona Scarlett
When Shauna leaves Dublin City for the suburbs with her mother, Dean enters her life as part of a soon-to-be-inseparable foursome of friends navigating the trials and tribulations of adolescence. The spark of friendship quickly blossoms towards something more for Shauna and Dean but, with their own struggles and ties pulling them separate ways, they…
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Book Review – A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume
Overwhelmed by urban life in Dublin, and life in general, artist Frankie, in her 20s, withdraws to live in her late grandmother’s rundown bungalow in the countryside. The novel moves back and forth in time, from her time in the bungalow to the city life she was fleeing to her rural childhood. With limited human…
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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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Book Review – Weave by Oein DeBhairduin & Deirdre Sullivan. Illustrated by Yingge Xu
Weave is a stunning work of literary art; a collaboration between writers Oein DeBhairduin and Deirdre Sullivan, and artist Yingge Xu. Containing eight stories inspired by the eight festivals in the wheel of the year, the flip reverse format – one side of the book starts with Sullivan’s stories and to read DeBhairduin’s you flip…
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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 – 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 – How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong
How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong is a strange and sharp collection of short stories, that packs so much into a small book. The stories are so different, the main unifying element being a foray into the unsettling and the jarring. There are stories where things may or may not have happened; or…
The Resting Willow 