Tag: Irish story

Foster – book review

Foster, by Clarie Keegan

‘I’d better hit the road,’ Da says. ‘What hurry is on you?’ Kinsella says. ‘The daylight is burning, and I’ve yet the spuds to spray.’ We’re in Ireland again, back with the wonderful Claire Keegan and her intimate descriptions of all the small things that make up a life. Another top class novella from a writer fast becoming my favourite. Here a girl is sent from a struggling household to stay with an older couple, her mother’s people, on a Wexford farm. Her mother is pregnant again and unable to cope, her siblings run wild. Her dad drops her off and hits the road.

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So Late in the Day – book review

So Late in the Day, by Claire Keegan

Cathal is one of those blokes a friend might go out with and say, you know, he’s OK. He’s got a job, not bad looking. We meet Cathal looking out of his office window where the day is good: sunshine; birds; the smell of cut grass; “so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.” Cathal is writing rejection letters for bursary applicants. And there we have it, Keegan gives us the heads up that this is not a happily-ever-after. In this poignant novella, the fact that Cathal is not one of life’s winners is revealed through the world around him.

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Prophet Song – book review

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch

When I described the plot of this book to my hubby – about a country turned to anarchy, the tyranny of a government and brutality of the rebels –he said it could never happen in modern Ireland. This surprised me, as we had lived in London during the troubles, had felt the bombings personally. It wasn’t so long ago. And Hitler’s rise to power less than a century ago illustrates how a modern country can turn on itself in a heartbeat of time. Why assume sectarian violence has gone away? And yet Ireland, today, seems such a peaceful place. Paul Lynch’s book imagines how, still, it could turn. Horribly, given the increasingly polarised state of the world, I found his scenario felt entirely possible.

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