Rebecca at Bookish Beck hosts a monthly Love Your Library Meme on the last Monday of every month to celebrate all things library-related, but you can share the library love at any point during the month. Some suggestions for posts are:

• Photos or a list of your latest library book haul
• An account of a visit to a new-to-you library
• Full-length or mini reviews of some recent library reads
• A description of a particular feature of your local library
• A screenshot of the state of play of your online account
• An opinion piece about library policies (e.g. Covid procedures or fines amnesties)
• A write-up of a library event you attended, such as an author reading or book club.

This month, I decided to take part and share the books I recently checked out. My son attended a chess club at our local library last week, so I took advantage while I waited for him and did some browsing. Whether I can find the time to read these during the madness of Reading Ireland Month is another matter, but when has that ever stopped me acquiring books?

The Coward by Jarred McGinnis

The Coward is a semi-autobiographical novel. The narrator is named Jarred. He is also American and a paraplegic, as is the author and the events of the book mirror McGinnis’s real life experiences.

After a car accident, Jarred discovers he will never walk again. Confined to a ‘giant roller-skate’, he finds himself with neither money nor job. Worse still, he is forced to live back home with the father he hasn’t spoken to in ten years. Add in a shoplifting habit, an addiction to painkillers and the fact that total strangers now treat him like he’s an idiot and it’s a recipe for self-destruction. How can he stop himself careering out of control?

To be honest, it wasn’t so much the premise of The Coward that made me check it out, rather it was McGinnis’s droll author’s bio which states that ‘ he inspires the able-bodied by using public transport and taking his daughters to the playground’ and lists his website as wickedtomocktheafflicted.com

A Run in the Park by David Park

I am such an admirer of David Park’s writing and felt that his last two novels, Spies in Canaan and Travelling in a Strange Land were criminally under-appreciated. I was quite surprised to find this slim book of inter-linked short stories as I hadn’t heard of it before and probably because, from a design point of view it looks more like a light frothy chick-lit book than the more serious novels for which he is known.

A Run in the Park tells the stories of a group of strangers who come together to run. Angela and Brendan are racing towards a wedding day that is increasingly tainted by doubts. Yana runs to free herself from the darkness of the past and to remember her missing brother. Cathy thinks about the secret she has been unable to share. Running takes Maurice past his daughter’s house, the place he is not allowed to enter.

Over the nine weeks unexpected friendships are forged, challenges faced and by the time of their final run together, all will grasp a new commitment to life itself.

This isn’t the type of book I would usually pick up but it’s David Park, so it is bound to be good and it could fit in well with my Reading Ireland Month plans.

All Along the Echo by Danny Denton

Another choice that might make it into my Reading Ireland Month pile, All Along the Echo is a book I highlighted before publication last year.

An editor of The Stinging Fly, Danny Denton made a splash with his debut novel The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow. His new book has been compared to George Saunders and Samuel Beckett and is set in the world of talk radio.

Tony Cooney, is a radio talk-show host, who takes a road trip across Ireland as part of a publicity stunt organized by a local car dealership. Giving away a car, the catch is that it must go to one of the many emigrants who have recently returned home to escape a wave of escalating terror attacks in London. As he travels across Ireland in the company of his producer Lou Fitzpatrick, navigating Holiday Inns and dual carriageways, all the while giving airtime to a cacophony of voices calling into the show, this turns into a road trip with a difference, changing Tony and Lou’s life forever. Alternating between ‘ON AIR’ and ‘OFF AIR’ segments, the novel experiments with layout and style – some sections are formatted as radio scripts; others are broken up with nonsense words and static interference.

Hailed as ‘one of the best novels of 2022’ by The Telegraph, All Along the Echo sounds like the kind of book I’d really enjoy.

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Have you read any of these books, or do any take your fancy? Have you checked anything interesting out of your library this month?

Uncategorized #LoveYourLibrary danny denton david park jarred mcginnis