Read Ireland Book News - Issue 55 - New Fiction
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Pilgrims by John Evans (Paperback; 7.99 IRP / 10.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Michael Dwyer is an expatriate: an Irishman from Wexford who has chosen to live in Germany. Summoned home for his father's funeral, he is forced to face the past that he has struggled to escape. He is grimly determined not to let his homeland re-establish its grip on him and manages - for the moment - to side-step his responsibilities.
But Michael's life is not a simple choice between an obligation to a freshly widowed mother and the fiercely guarded anonymity of his expatriate existence: there is also his partner Maria and the baby - his baby - she is expecting. And Claire, the friend of his youth, who is now ready to love him. Michael's hard-won emotional detachment seems to make it possible for him to continue indefinitely inflicting pain on those who care for him. But life has a way of catching up on even the most determined of fugitives …
The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey (Hardback; 12.99 IRP / 17.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
When Cliona leaves the Irish island of Inis Muruch for Boston, she dreams of a new life. But love and pain shape her destiny, and when she returns to the small island years later, in the place of her fulfilled dreams she has a fierce and beautiful daughter, Grace.
The sea is a barrier to the tiny stretch of land that is Inis Muruch, but only when Grace swims there can she feel warm and free. It is Seamus who offers her his heat to end the damp cold which makes her feel waterlogged and cursed. Their love is shaped by a fear which makes her as terrified of losing him as she is of giving herself up. The island remains a prison to Grace and she slips away by night with her baby daughter, Grainne, disappearing like a mermaid sliding under the sea.
At 15 Grainnne returns to Inis Muruch with her grandmother, Cliona, repeating the journey her mother was forced to make years before. She endeavours to understand the choices made by the women who have gone before her and searches for the father who she cannon remember. Through the myth and mystery of the island and its language, Gainnne learns about the mermaids of Irish folklore who seek to escape from their lovers and return to the watery wilderness of the sea, leaving behind them the responsibility and pain that love brings.
This warm and sensitive debut novel examines the patterns of love, resentment and forgiveness in the lives of three women torn between passion and duty, dream and reality.
The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett (Hardback; 14.99 IRP / 18.99 USD) [Add To Basket]
This is a novel of love and desire and the blinding effect, set in the Congo at a turning point for Africa. Expatriates loll about their pools in a colonial paradise soon to erupt into chaos; huge crowds are drawn to the charismatic independence leader, Patrice Lumumba - and his rivals; one man sees the cracks appearing around him and struggles to hold on to his lover, his sanity, and ultimately his life.
Gillespie, the outsider, is in Leopoldville for the beautiful Italian, Iries. He is desperate for her love; she is obsessed with the unfolding drama. In a world slipping out of control, gripped by disgust, fear and incomprehension, events threaten to overwhelm him - as does his friendship with the amiable American, Stipe, with his canny driver, Auguste, and through everything Iries, always Iries.
As the mess of corruption and injustice gives way to brutality and murder, Gillespie is finally forced to confront what is happening before his eyes. In subtle, haunting prose, the author captures the complex ricochet between the personal and the political, cruelty, lust and the erotic. This is a courageous novel; it achieves a refined sensibility which leaves the reader emotionally riven.
Blood Ties by Jennifer Lash (Paperback; 8.30 IRP / 12.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Violet Farr is Irish, married to the ineffectual Cecil, a repressed homosexual. In a moment of joyless union the conceive a son, the absurd Lumsden, but they are incapable of showing him love. He himself is a ne'er do well and fathers an illegitimate child, Spencer, by a lost soul named Dolly, herself a refugee from an unhappy upbringing in a Surrey village. When the severely neglected, traumatised boy is dumped on Violet, his grandmother, he becomes the focus for all the despair and disappointment that her son had loaded upon her. This is a compelling novel, precise and vivid, a novel which probes every exposed nerve of family feeling and family hell. It is a harrowing story but ultimately a profoundly inspiring one.
A Sort of Homecoming by Robert Cremins (Paperback; 10.00 IRP / 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Iremonger has arrived - back in Dublin for Christmas, and centre-stage (he'd have it no other way) in your imagination. A young man on an anti-mission, he has spent the last six months blowing his revered grandfather's legacy on a transcontinental lost weekend. Armed with his trusty leather jacket 'Nico' - a virtual second skin, he's intent on having fun and isn't going to let the 'bully boys of existence' (the past the future) push him around. But after a season of excess, it turns out to be the present that finally catches up with him.
A novel of 'mad pinters' and priests, roomkeepers and ravers, 'semtex' and sensibility, this novel is as much about the old truths as it is about the new Ireland.
In the Season of the Daisies by Tom Phelan (Paperback; 9.99 IRP / 16.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
One night in 1921 and IRA action goes horribly wrong, leaving young Willie Doolan dead. Set in an Irish village, the story of that fateful night unfolds through the distinct voices of each character: the schoolteacher, the butcher, the doctor, the shopkeeper, the priest, and Seanie - Willie's twin brother - whose ghostlike presence serves as a constant reminder. In a direct and uncompromising style, the author conveys the town's pain and loss, the power of evil, love's redemption, and the toll of ancient animosities.
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