Kevin Barry’s Dark Lies the Island is a sharp collection of thirteen tales about the unheroic, the little people for whom success is a far away dream. The best of these stories turn dramatically with a well-placed phrase, causing the reader to stumble and re-evaluate what has gone before. All are written with a vividness,…
Read more No 426 Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry #readingirelandmonth21
Keith Ridgway’s most recent novel, Hawthorn & Child had a fragmented, unnerving quality which made it feel as much like a collection of linked short stories as a novel. It was, the Guardian review noted, ‘a story about stories in a novel that isn’t a novel’. You can see the hints of this same atmosphere…
Read more No 427 Standard Time by Keith Ridgway #readingirelandmonth21
Caroline Blackwood is probably not best known for her writing. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling ‘muse’ courtesy of her high-profile marriages first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell. Born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster, she was presented as a debutante…
Read more No 430 Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood #readingirelandmonth21
It’s Contemporary Literature Week on Reading Ireland Month and Claire Keegan’s Foster certainly falls into that category as it was published by Faber in 2010. However, I could just as easily have included it in next week’s Classic Literature category because that is what Foster will undoubtedly become. A classic. In fairness, Foster could also…
Read more No 431 Foster by Claire Keegan #ReadingIrelandMonth21
By Crooked Cat author, Val Penny
Energy with Positive Purpose
There is nothing more satisfying than reading a book while sipping a hot cup of tea.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. – Italo Calvino
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