Book Review -Thin Places - Kerri Ní Dochartaigh
Kerri Ni Dochartaigh's memoir is a mix of of nature, memoir and social history about the North Of Ireland during the troubles and subsequent years. Raw, lyrical and unflinching.
Book Review - Rules of Civility - Amor Towles
This book is set in a wonderfully recreated and detailed New York, 1938, with intriguing, believable but flawed characters featuring in a story beautifully written. At times funny, elegant and poignant.
Book Review - Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
It seems that everyone has read Shuggie Bain by now so I thought it was about time I posted my review on an incredibly immersive novel that is gritty and depressing, but also about survival and love.
Book review - Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape - Manchán Magan
Manchán Magan’s fascinating book sets out to explore the Irish language and it’s roots in nature, people and animals, as well as cosmology and other ancient civilisations.
Book Review -Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall
Tim Marshall’s ‘Prisoners of Geography’ is an engaging introduction to the world of geopolitics and explains a lot of the ambitions of global powers and how they are curbed by natural barriers.
Book Review - Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro’s dystopian novel about a Artificial Friend called Klara is beautifully written, as you’d expect, but is it up there with previous books by the Nobel Prize winning author?
Book Review - Hidden Valley Road - Inside the mind of an American Family-Robert Kolker
The harrowing and enthralling story of the Galvins, a family of twelve children brought up in Colorado, six of whom went on to develop schizophrenia. This is their story, about how it affected their family and the contribution they made to sciences understanding of the disease.
Book review - Winterkill - Ragnar Jónasson
Ragnar Jónasson’s final book in the Dark Iceland series finds Ari Thor investigating the death of a nineteen year old student - was her death murder or suicide? Another entertaining, claustrophobic tightly plotted thriller that takes place in the middle of a blizzard.
Book Review - No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwoods book bristles with energy, and is both sharp and funny. What starts off as somewhat ironic take on the online lives we lead gives way to a story that is genuinely moving, with wonderfully lyrical prose. Haven’t read anything like this all year.
Book Review - Leonard and Hungry Paul - Rónán Hession
Rónán Hessions debut novel is a warm hearted read about two thirty something friends relatively happy in their own skins, getting on with their lives. But with a love interest, an upcoming wedding and an unexpected windfall, things begin to change……
Book Review - To Paradise - Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara’s latest spans two hundred years and 720 pages. It’s large in scope and at times unwieldy and this is my attempt to review it. Is it any good? As long as it is, best not to read if you are entering isolation……….
Book Review - Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
Claires Keegan’s Novella is that thing of rare beauty, a short, honest, heartbreaking book set around Bill Furlong, a coal Merchant making deliveries during a cold Christmas in Ireland, 1985.
Book Review - Utopia For Realists (And how we get there) - Rutger Bregman
A review of Rutger Bregman’s ‘utopia for realists’ which is an engaging call to arms for a new utopia, with ideas such as the end of poverty and the creation of a 15 hour week. Time to get off the hamster wheel.
Book Review - Crossroads - Jonathan Franzen
Franzens brilliantly written saga, set in the seventies, is a warm, deep and funny exploration of the family dynamics of the Hildebrandt clan and the choices they make in their lives and their relationship to each other and God.
Book Review - Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
In this superb novella by Edith Wharton, a man arrives in Starkfield, Massachusetts and is intrigued by the figure of Ethan Frome, a man of whom the townsfolk say little. Later, the man is forced to spend the night in the Frome household and learns more about his earlier life…...
Book Review - The Monk - Paul Williams
The story of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch, one of Irelands most enigmatic crime figures and locked in a deadly feud with the Kinahan Cartel. Grim reading at times, but recommended for any fans of true crime.
Book Review - The Midnight Library - Matt Haig
Nora Seed has had enough and wants to die. She then finds herself in the midnight library, where she can access all the lives she could have had. It could have been incredibly twee, but instead Matt Haig has written a book with empathy and hope at it’s heart.
Book review - The Nothing Man - Catherine Ryan Howard
Superior Irish thriller about a survivor who decides after 18 years that she wants to hunt for the serial killer who murdered her family.
Book review - Rememberings - Sinéad O’Connor
A rollercoaster of an autobiography by the protest singer, Sinéad O’Connor, from her troubled childhood through to her singing career and mental health troubles. Raw, honest and revealing.
Snowflake - Louise Nealon - Book Review
An accomplished debut by young Irish writer, Louise Nealon, about 18 year old Debbie growing up in rural Ireland before moving to Dublin, about family, mental health and relationships.
