Tag: Irish writing

Water – book review

Water, by John Boyne

The last John Boyne I reviewed went in my books that don’t make the cut page. This one, however, was a highlight of the year so far (hey, it’s only February).

A woman arrives on an island off the coast of Ireland with chopped hair and a new name and takes a remote house. It’s a fail-safe start to a yarn. Why is she there, who is she hiding from, what’s happened? She’s been all over the press, we learn. Her husband is in jail, disgraced. Willow, not her real name, engages with the community on the island, enough to keep the gossipers away, hoping they wont discover her past. She takes a young lover, has the occasional meal at the local pub. Thinks about how she ended up in hiding. Boyne leads us along through this excellent woman’s voice, into a past story that slowly unfolds.

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Small Things Like These – book review

Small Things like These, by Claire Keegan

The Magdalen laundries, tool of the Catholic Church and Irish state, was closed down in 1996, in abject disgrace. In 2013 the Irish government gave a much belated apology to the women who had suffered in these prisons of forced labour. Women who had ‘fallen’ and needed to be removed from society. Some thirty thousand women are estimated to have been incarcerated, their babies adopted out. A shocking number of babies died.

Fallen. That word. Young women ‘fell’ pregnant. Their fault for being a bit clumsy, tripping up because they weren’t paying attention.

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Love — book review

It’s pretty bold, calling your book Love. You’ve got to be confident to think anyone will find you on google with that title. So this is a destination book, for those of us who already love Roddy Doyle (me). And the cover is unbelievably gorgeous.

This is a modern day love story, where loves are described by two increasingly drunk old friends across a collection of Dublin’s pubs. The love is off the page, we don’t meet any of the beloved. It’s one guy talking most of the time — that’s Joe gabbing about meeting up again with a girl the men both fancied way back and leaving his wife for her (don’t get him wrong, he loves his wife but this is different); and our man listening — that’s Davie, frustrated by Joe’s circuitous story, thinking of his wife at home in England, how they met, why he loves her.

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Converstations with Friends & Normal People – book reviews

Sally Rooney is my new discovery. Sure, I’m behind the play on this one, the last two years have seen her plastered with awards. Don’t ask me why she is so good, I find it hard to say why I find the lives of twenty something Irish students and their friends so compelling. They don’t go on adventures or do remarkable things. Their journeys are mostly internal and all about relationships. They’re going through the  pretty mundane stuff of growing up, involving incidents that you’ll probably recognise, things that you or your friends might have struggled with.

The two books are similar, each with the main character a very bright girl at university in Dublin, with family issues pulling her emotional strings and intense friendships. Continue reading “Converstations with Friends & Normal People – book reviews”