Books

DAYS WITHOUT END. By Sebastian Barry. Faber & Faber, £17.99 Sebastian Barry, that scrupulous chronicler of lost Irish lives, has now turned his attention to the Civil War – though not, as you might expect, the dreadful bloodletting that began here in 1922 but the even more dreadful American one six decades earlier. So what’s […]

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SMILE. By Roddy Doyle. Jonathan Cape, £13.99 in UK The inside cover of Roddy Doyle’s new novel assures you that when you finish the last of its 214 pages “you will have been challenged to re-evaluate everything you think you remember so clearly”. And the accompanying press release makes the bold claim that “a great […]

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SOLAR BONES. By Mike McCormack. Tramp Press For those of timid reading habits, there’s good news and there’s bad news about Mike McCormack’s arresting new novel. The bad news is that throughout its 217 pages there isn’t one full stop. The good news is that there are lots of commas and indented breaks, so that […]

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GRACE. By Paul Lynch. Oneworld, £12.99 sterling Irish book blurbs are getting out of hand. Time was when we were famous as a nation of begrudgers, but nowadays our writers can do no wrong – at least among their fellow authors, who would have us believe they’re all geniuses. When Paul Lynch’s The Black Snow, […]

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MIDWINTER BREAK. By Bernard MacLaverty. Jonathan Cape, £14.99 in the UK Bernard MacLaverty is not a prolific novelist. Fourteen years elapsed between Cal in 1983 and Grace Notes in 1997 and a further sixteen between The Anatomy School in 2001 and this new book, although throughout the decades he has also published five collections of […]

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A LADDER TO THE SKY by John Boyne. Doubleday This is a hugely enjoyable novel about ambition, fraud, murder and the writing game from a writer who, ever since The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’s global success in 2006, has been fizzing with ideas, is a dab hand at telling a story and creates vividly […]

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SEAMUS HEANEY IN CONTEXT. Edited by Geraldine Higgins. Cambridge University Press Now that Seamus Heaney is no longer with us to enrich our reading lives with new inspirations, along come the academic embalmers to set their seal on his poetic stature and importance. Thirty-two of them do so, with varying degrees of success, in this […]

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GREAT IRISH LIVES: Obituaries of Ireland’s Finest. Edited by Charles Lysaght. Times Books, £12.99 sterling A painting of Seamus Heaney adorns the cover of this collection of obituaries, and the substantial entry on the poet calls attention to his “famously twinkling eyes” while also noting approvingly his life-long refusal “to become a poster boy for […]

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THE LESSER BOHEMIANS. By Eimear McBride. Faber & Faber, £13.99 Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing created a sensation when it appeared in 2013. Rejected for almost a decade by a succession of mainstream publishers, it was finally taken up by the small Galley Beggar press in Norwich and went on to win […]

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In Christine Dwyer Hickey’s new novel, which is set during the summer of 1950, a 10-year-old German boy who lives in New York with his foster parents is sent for the summer to Cape Cod, where he becomes friendly with a famous American painter and his wife. In terms of storyline, that’s about it, the […]

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THE INNOCENT OF FALKLAND ROAD. By Carlo Gebler. New Island, €13.95 This beguiling novel chronicles a year in the life of a London schoolboy as he struggles to comprehend the adult world around him and to define his own confused feelings about it all. It is August 1964 in the suburb of Putney and 12-year-old […]

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THE LOCK-UP. By John Banville. Faber & Faber John Banville has published four novels in two and a half years, including three thrillers featuring detective St John Strafford. Two of these also feature pathologist Garret Quirke, a familiar figure to readers of the 1950-set thrillers written by Banville under the nom de plume Benjamin Black. […]

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MRS OSMOND. By John Banville. Viking, £14.99 sterling His first book having been published almost fifty years ago, John Banville has long been the most distinctive Irish novelist of his generation, his work quite unlike that of any other Irish writer. Not for him the realist concerns of a John McGahern or a William Trevor; […]

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THE LETTERS OF JOHN MCGAHERN. Edited by Frank Shovlin. Faber & Faber, £30 in UK. Such is Frank Shovlin’s remarkable scholarship throughout these 800 pages that the book is worth reading for its annotations alone. If McGahern mentions in passing an upcoming football match in 1973, a footnote on the same page tells the reader […]

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THE MAGICIAN. By Colm Toibin. Viking What’s the difference between the biography of a famous person and a novel about that famous person in which the factual details are much the same as in the biography? And what can the novelist hope to achieve in seeking to enrich our understanding and appreciation of that particular […]

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MY FATHER’S HOUSE. By Joseph O’Connor. Harvill Secker. On the first page of Joseph O’Connor’s new novel we’re introduced to Delia Kiernan, who’s married to a diplomat, and already older readers may be getting echoes from her name and status – wasn’t Delia Murphy, long familiar to Radio Eireann listeners of the 1950s and 1960s […]

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HAVEN. By Emma Donoghue. Picador In June 2012, encouraged and accompanied by our daughter, we embarked on the scariest boat trip I’ve ever undertaken. The morning was stormy when we set off from Portmagee in west Kerry on our way to Skellig Michael seven miles out in the ocean and, given the sea’s turbulence, most […]

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THE GARDEN. By Paul Perry. New Island. I know very little about orchids and even less about ghost orchids. But they’re to be found in Cuba and in the Florida everglades, and the pursuit of these elusive flowers, highly prized because of their rarity, forms the subject of Paul Perry’s atmospheric and absorbing novel, which […]

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APRIL IN SPAIN. By John Banville. Faber & Faber For much of this hugely enjoyable and exciting thriller, John Banville is in playful, almost skittish, mood. It’s the 1950s and Dublin pathologist Quirke (previously encountered in the books by the author’s former alter ego Benjamin Black), has embarked on a happy second marriage. He and […]

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