The latest addition to my website is Anne Enright‘s The Wren. This novel tells off three generations, an irresponsible but apparently great Irish poet, his wife, their daughters and granddaughter. Phil, the poet, will abandon his wife, Terry, when she gets breast cancer and, as he goes to the US, essentially abandons his daughters, though … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Chris McCabe‘s Dedalus. McCabe is a modern poet but he has written a novel which is a homage to James Joyce, a sequel to Joyce’s Ulysses and a fascinating work in its own right. This post is being written on 16 June, Bloomsday, the day on which (in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jan Carson ‘s The Fire Starters. This novel is set in Belfast sixteen years after The Troubles. The local authorities have restricted the heights of the traditional Eleventh Night tall bonfires to below thirty feet. However an arsonist has been starting fires above thirty feet on public buildings, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pat Gray‘s Narrator. The narrator is called, yes, Mr (Basil) Narrator. He is in (a fictitious) Morocco working for a British engineering firm and trying to get a project fior a pump-house approved which had been on track but now is not. This seemingly requires getting to the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick McCabe‘s Poguemahone. The title is the Irish for kiss my arse. Our main characters are Una and Dan Fogarty Now (2019) Una has dementia and is in a care home in southern England, where she causes a certain amount of disruption while Dan takes care of her. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pat Gray‘s The Redemption Cut. In one respect this is your standard detective story – maverick cop ignores his bosses, the rules and “modern policing techniques” to solve the crime. However, it is set in Belfast in 1976 during The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the cop, McCann, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eoghan Smith‘s A Provincial Death. Smyth, a researcher studying the Moon is clinging to a rock two-three kilometres off the coast of Ireland. Neither we nor he know why he is here. He gradually recovers his memory and we learn that his boss has predicted that the Moon … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Brian Keogh‘s Le Fanu’s Angel. Our hero is Kiran Sheridan Le Fanu, who may be related to the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. At the beginning of he book, he has been involved in a serious car crash. His boss, the driver, has been killed and he is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Peadar O’Donnell‘s The Big Windows. Brigid lives on an island and has married Tom, who lives on the mainland, in a glen, surrounded by mountains. She moves to the mainland to join her husband but things do not go well. Some of the women jostle and bully her, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Peadar O’Donnell‘s Islanders (US: The Way it Was With Them). The island in question is Inniscara, offshore from Arranmore, which, in turn is offshore from the Donegal mainland. O’Donnell worked on Arranmore as a teacher. It recounts the hard life of the people there, as we follow the … Read more