*That’s all Folks! So there we have it. Another Reading Ireland Month/ Begorrathon is over and what a great month it was! With over 130 blog posts, an array of writers, poets, musicians and movies were explored. I read and reviewed 20 books by Irish authors, reduced the 746 by 10 and discovered many, many…
Tender was my favourite read of 2015 and I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about this book that got under my skin. Could it be that it is a university novel set Dublin in the 1990s – a time when I too was at university there? Is it the epigraph,…
To celebrate Irish women writers, I am delighted to host a very exciting giveaway on the blog this week. I will be giving away a hardback copy of The Long Gaze Back, an anthology of short stories by Irish female writers, edited by Sinéad Gleeson along with a copy of Maeve Brennan’s novella The Visitor,…
On Wednesday 28th October 2015, the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre, launched its programme to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Waking the Nation featured ten plays, a mix of newly commissioned work and well-known theatre classics. However, they failed to notice that out of the ten plays programmed in the 2016 programme,…
Read more #WakingtheFeminists – Three plays by Irish Female Playwrights
Following on from This Is Not a Novel, here is another seemingly quiet novel about friendship and family that has a depth and insight that belies a simple exterior. The Irish actor Molly Fox is the finest of her generation. On Midsummer’s Day, Molly’s birthday, she is in New York working on a play…
Reading Ireland Month continues and all this week I will be focusing on women writers from Ireland to maybe introduce you to some you may not have read or known too much about. Like many female writers from Ireland, Jennifer Johnston is not as widely read as she should be as is often underestimated given…
After years of rejection, Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, a tale of the impact of the recession on the lives of people in rural Ireland, became a literary sensation. He won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature and the Irish Book Award as well as being longlisted for the Booker Prize.…
William Trevor, one of Ireland’s most lauded short story writers says, Heroes don’t really belong in short stories. As Frank O’Connor said, “Short stories are about little people,” and I agree. I find the unheroic side of people much richer and more entertaining than black-and-white success. Kevin Barry’s Dark Lies the Island is a…
In The Night of the Silver Fox, one of the many stand out stories in Danielle McLaughlin’s memorable collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets, a character notes that Trouble knows its way around Trouble certainly knows it’s way around in these 11 stories – each an intense exploration of loneliness and distance, each displaying the vulnerability…
Book Reviews By A Geek
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