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
Eoin McNamee has made his name as an author of noirish literary reimaginings of real life crimes. From the Shankill Butchers to Princess Diana, he mines the novelistic possibilities that real life murder and conspiracy is alive with. His writing is lyrical, at times beautiful and always at odds with his subject matter. The…
Read more No 589 The Blue Tango by Eoin McNamee
The book I have chosen for this week’s The Book That Built the Blogger is Joan Lingard’s 1970 book The Twelfth Day of July – another book that would probably be considered YA today but which opened my eyes to the possibilities of where books could go – and more imp The Twelfth Day of…
Read more The Books that Built the Blogger: The Twelfth Day of July by Joan Lingard
Yesterday it was announced that New Island Books will publish a new collection of short stories by women writers from the North of Ireland in Autumn 2016. The book, called The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland will be edited by journalist and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson and it is…
Read more Putting Women Writers from the North of Ireland in the spotlight!
I read Stuart Neville’s The Twelve for Reading Ireland Month back in March and was impressed with a thrilling, well-paced crime novel that perfectly depicted a Northern Ireland trying to come to terms with life after the ostensible end of the Troubles. His new novel Those We Left Behind, he has moved on immeasurably from…
Read more Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville
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