Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 408 - 29 March 2008
Irish Fiction and Poetry
The Truth Commissioner by David Park
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 372 pages
Henry Stanfield is pleased with his new title: "Truth Commissioner" has a pleasing ring to it. But his neutrality, as the product of an Irish Catholic mother and an English Protestant father, is about to be tested. Francis Gilroy, Minister for Children and Culture, has murky secrets that could leave him vulnerable, but his people have dealt with them; after all, it was a war they were fighting. James Fenton, retired RUC policeman, is haunted by the small, vulnerable white face of a boy who he could have saved, and failed to. Danny and Ramona flick through brochures, choosing a cot for their unborn child - but now the past is about to pull Danny back to Belfast and threaten everything beautiful and fragile that they have built together. Four very different men hold the secret between them of what happened to fifteen-year-old Conor Walshe on 10th May 1990. David Park tells each of their stories in prose that is insightful, direct and utterly involving. (Also available in hardback, priced at 22 Euro).
Bloodstorm by Sam Millar
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 220 pages [Add To Basket]
Set against a gritty Belfast backdrop, this is the first in a new crime series from the acclaimed author of The Redemption Factory and The Darkness of Bones. Karl Kaes is a private investigator with a dark past. As a child, he witnessed the brutal rape and murder of his mother. The same man sexually molested Karl, leaving him for dead with horrific knife wounds covering his body. Years later, on an unforgettable Good Friday night, Karl has the chance to avenge his mother’s murder by killing the man responsible. For reasons he later regards as cowardice, Karl allows the opportunity to slip through his hands, only to be shattered when, two days later, two young girls are sexually molested and brutally murdered by the killer on Easter Sunday morning. Karl holds himself responsible for their deaths.
Caulfield by Philip Lumley
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 386 pages
"Caulfield" is a fine novel, which is both comic and romantic, as it takes Caulfield from a small town in Tipperary to the Jewish world of high finance and family intrigue. Caulfield has everything that the banker, Herzog, and his beautiful wife, Abigail, require. Can Caulfield help them at the risk of hidden dangers to himself? And what can he do when he falls helplessly in love with Prudence, the aristocratic daughter of a family whose title goes back to the Tudors? He enters a milieu of tennis parties and grand dinners. Their romance is real, but does it have to end in tears? What is the truth behind McNight and his sinister death? Why does he hate Herzog and seek to destroy him? Caulfield's life is intertwined with his college friends and above all with Isaac Herzog, who was born in a one-room cold water flat in Dorset Street. Herzog has acquired great wealth and seeks to buy Caulfield. But will Caulfield sell?
Somewhere in Between by Ruth Gilligan
Trade Paperback; 10 Euro /15 USD / 8 UK; 426 pages [Add To Basket]
The exams are finally over, the sun is shining and celebration is in the air. For twins Chloe and Alex the future looks bright, if a bit uncertain. But turbulence is not far from the horizon. It begins when Alex is in a car crash on the way home from a drinking binge with friends. Miraculously he escapes with just cuts and bruises, but the driver's life hangs in the balance. Alex tells himself it's only a matter of time before his friend 'wakes up', but his free and easy ways are put to the ultimate test over the dramatic weeks to follow. For Chloe, insecurities begin chip away at the edges of her 'balanced' world: her relationship with Sam, her drama school chances, her weight. Her friends are worried that she's getting too thin. But thin is not what Chloe sees when she looks in the mirror. A holiday to Ayia Napa with the gang promises to be the escape everyone needs, the ideal bridge between school and ! real life. But as the party rages on, Alex and Chloe realise that there are some things that you can't escape from -- as they struggle to find the somewhere at the other side of somewhere in between.
It Must Be Love by Sharon Owens
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 322 pages
When Sarah Cameron changes her mind about getting married to the very eligible George Rochester, and runs away from London to a small seaside village on the west coast of Ireland, the last thing she expects to find is true love with a reclusive widower who lives there. As the summer progresses, Sarah begins to make new friends; with kind-hearted bookworm Aurora Blackstaff, opinionated newspaper columnist Gemma Hayes and secretive would-be husband-killer Miriam Gray. And when Sarah's dearest friend Abigail suddenly marries George and starts a family with him, Sarah knows there is no going back. At thirty-five, she is starting from scratch again. Can Sarah make a go of her new business enterprise and forge a meaningful life for herself as the Queen of Ice Cream?
For All We Know by Ciaran Carson
Paperback; 14 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 110 pages
Shortly after a man and a woman meet for the first time in a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast, a bomb goes off. It is some time in the 1970s. They become lovers. For All We Know is their story, told in the recent past: a meditation on love, place, memory, loss and language, how people know each other, misunderstand each other, or translate each other, not to mention the events and circumstances which are beyond their control.
Gesturing towards a conventional sonnet sequence – the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples thereof, in lines of fourteen syllables – Ciaran Carson’s novelistic book also references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. In its uncanny music, repercussions and reprises, its mysterious unfolding of what happened or what might have been in Paris and Dresden (or was it Berlin?), For All We Know is a sequence of poems like nothing you’ve ever read before. (Also available in hardback priced at 20 Euro)
Selected Poems of John Jordan edited by Hugh McFadden
Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 140 pages [Add To Basket]
Poet and story writer, actor, broadcaster, critic and one-time academic at University College, Dublin, John Jordan (1930-88) was a leading light in the literary life of Dublin from the 1950s until his death in Cardiff in June 1988. A close friend of the poet Patrick Kavanagh and of the novelist Kate O'Brien, he edited the seminal '60s magazine Poetry Ireland and was the founding editor in the early 1980s of its successor, Poetry Ireland Review. His collected works, including Crystal Clear: Selected Prose (Lilliput Press, 2006), have been edited by his literary executor, the poet and critic Hugh McFadden. "John Jordan was conscious of the general sense of malaise that pervaded post-war Europe. Some of the poems from the 1960s and '70s come close to expressing a sense of weltschmerz. [Others] are poems of pity and terror, and are truly haunting reflections on the nature of suffering, the mystery at the heart of forgiveness, and the question of redemption." -from the Introduction (also available in hardback, priced at 20 Euro)
To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems by Paddy Bushe
Trade Paperback; 16 Euro / 23 USD /11 UK; 236 pages [Add To Basket]
PADDY BUSHE was born in Dublin in 1948 and now lives in Waterville, Co. Kerry. A prize-winning poet both in Irish and in English, his collections include Poems With Amergin (1989), Teanga (1990), Counsellor (1991), Digging Towards The Light (1994), In Ainneoin na gCloch (2001), Hopkins on Skellig Michael (2001) and, most recently, The Nitpicking of Cranes (2004). The recipient of the Oireachtas prize for poetry in 2006, he was also the recipient of the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems gathers work from all of his previous publications, and, as Bernard O'Donoghue suggests in his Introduction, shows Bushe to have assumed Hartnett's mantle as "the leading poet writing in both Irish and English . This book does a magnificent service to Irish literature and the Irish language, by showing them to be anything but parochial. Its humanism reaches out to all times and cultures and places. We should take note. And it is something of a miracle that a work which is so instructive and thought-provoking is at the same time so riveting and enjoyable." (also available in hardback, priced at 25 Euro)
The Big Snow by David Park
Paperback; 11 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 274 pages [Add To Basket]
Northern Ireland, 1963. This is the story of a time muffled and made claustrophobic by unprecedented snow falls, and of a community caught in the slow dance of this frozen land. Suddenly shaken free from the normal patterns of their lives by the extremity of the weather, the intimate desires of these people are thrown into sharp relief, as they experience love, death and finally murder.In a house with windows flung defiantly wide, a wife dies before her husband can make his confession. Her coffin is pulled to a church on a sledge by Peter, a young man engulfed by his first feelings of love for an older unattainable women. Elsewhere, an older women searches desperately for a wedding dress in her dreams of lover . When the electricity fails, a lonely headmaster is forced to close his school and in shadowy candlelight he is tempted into indiscretion. Meanwhile, in the very heart of the city, the purity of snow is tainted by the murder of a young women, and, as one ma! n begins to unravel the dark secrets of the city, he knows he is in a race against time – to find the murderer before the snow melts
This is the story of a time muffled and made claustrophobic by unprecedented snow falls. Suddenly shaken free from the normal patterns of their lives by the extremity of the weather, people find their intimate desires thrown into sharp relief and David Park shows this flawed slice of humanity to be somehow glorious. 'Ingenious' - "Sunday Times." 'A magnificent writer' - "Belfast Telegraph". 'Park writes prose like a poet; and the invisible lines of national borders and tribal territory are etched into a text which rolls through time and space.' - "The Times". 'Some of the more exhibitionist fictional voices currently clamouring for our attention seem mute in comparison' - "Independent". 'Considerable dexterity, freshness, and insight (A) well-crafted, closely observed tale.' - "Washington Post".
The Healing by David Park
Paperback; 11 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK [Add To Basket]
A man is shot dead before the eyes of his young son as they work together in the fields near their home - another victim of the violence in Northern Ireland. In the city, a confused and frightened old man grieves for his own loss and for the shattered world around him. When the young boy's mother moves them both from their country home to Belfast, the old man's life becomes entwined with that of the boy. Fascinated by the silent child, the old man believes he has at last found the instrument of healing.
Swallowing the Sun by David Park
Paperback; 11 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 244 pages [Add To Basket]
In the museum Martin stands watch over the past. He has travelled a long way from his brutal childhood in the Loyalist heartlands of Belfast and built a life he never imagined he would have - a devoted wife, Alison, two children, Rachel and Tom, a respectable job. But the happiness he has found feels brittle. Rachel's academic success is launching her out of her proud father's orbit. Tom, eclipsed by his sister, has withdrawn into a fantasy world. Martin's gratitude to Alison is a gulf between them. He feels unworthy of his wife, his life, his luck. Returning home one night to find police cars waiting, Martin feels his sins must have finally caught up with him. But their news is wholly unexpected, a senseless tragedy. And in the face of this devastating trauma, which tears his fragile family apart, Martin finds the violence of the past is not gone but merely dormant; its call must be answered at last.
Oranges from Spain by David Park
11 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 190 pages [Add To Basket]
"Oranges From Spain" is a collection of stories about of the trials of growing up in a community where tension, confusion and violence hold sway. Here, among other tales, a youthful seaside romance crosses the religious divide, a gang take turns at the wheel of a stolen car, and an exceptional student stirs the resentment of her troubled teacher. Set in Northern Ireland against the background of the troubles, these vignettes capture the spirit of adolescence in difficult times.
David Park is a gem of a writer. If you have not read one of his novels you are in for a rare treat.
The International by Glenn Patterson
Paperback; 11 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 255 pages [Add To Basket]
January 1967. Anti-Mao rebellion erupts in Shanghai; Ronald Reagan is sworn in as governor of California; Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Monkees make their first appearances in the UK charts.
In Belfast, an accidental fire in a shopping arcade is still big news. There, the last Saturday of the month is much like any other Saturday in the Blue Bar of the city's International Hotel. The bar is near empty as the day gets underway, becoming more crammed as people come in from the winter cold. From where he stands, arguing and joking with his fellow barmen, 18-year-old Danny sees a lot: a businessman sweet-talking a famous footballer; a councillor being primed to accept a bribe; the lone vigil of Stanley, an aspiring children's entertainer; and Ingrid, mysteriously lingering on the fringes of a wedding party. Respectable citizens mingle with dodgy characters as the hour grows late and the conversation more heated.
But although no-one realises it, ordinary days like this in Belfast are almost over. The next day the International will host the inaugural meeting of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Already, the hotel has been witness to the dark forces of reaction lurking in the political wings - and the morning's accidental fire is a grim foreshadowing of the conflagration to come.
Refreshingly non-partisan, funny and humane, Glenn Patterson's timely and important novel takes the reader back to the essential character of Belfast and its people and re-imagines it as the place it once was and might still be. Full of character and pathos, The International is an elegy for a time long gone and a poignant, moving portrait of a young man and a city before the loss of innocence.
Please note: Prices were correct at time of original posting but are subject to subsequent change without notice.
Gregory Carr, Independent Bookseller
Read Ireland
392 Clontarf Road
Dublin 3
Ireland
Tel + Fax: +353-1-853-2063
Customer Services Comments, Criticism and Questions
Subscribe to Read Ireland Book News - Our Free Weekly Email Newsletter