Tender by Belinda Mckeon
Set in and around Trinity College in the late 1990s this – Belinda McKeon’s second novel – is a lush, gorgeous love letter to Dublin and literature, as well as a story about obsessive love and first loves and, well, every kind of love, really. When James and Catherine meet for the first time, there is an instant spark of recognition, which leads them to spend hours and together, talking long into the night and enjoying that rush which comes from spending time with someone who really gets you. She’s a student of English literature and he’s just back from Berlin, where he worked with a famous photographer. Together, they are invincible. All of a sudden, a whole new Dublin is opened up for Catherine as she accompanies James on his various arty outings. But while he quizzes her on the boys she might fancy, and even tries to set her up with one or two of them, he resists Catherine’s attempts to fix him up. The descriptions of Catherine’s trips home, where she feels increasingly out of place, are all too convincing, as are the short, loaded conversations between her and a boy who clearly adores the ground she walks on. If this sounds like a rave review, that’s because it couldn’t be any more glowing – this is an absolute ‘wow’ of a book.
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The Green Road by Anne Enright
Maeve Binchy happily admitted to eavesdropping liberally when out in public and her writing was well-known and much loved for its down-to-earth and very recognizable characters. But where Binchy specialized in the slightly flawed glories of humanity, Anne Enright tends to target those flaws and portray an entirely different side to the story. Her characters are all too human – not a saint among them. The Green Road is replete with such prickly characters: the bossy, overbearing mother – so familiar to readers of Irish and Jewish literature – the absent son, the martyred daughter, and the ungrateful grandchildren. Enright really does see the worst of us, and her keen observations offer a glance in the mirror that is not always comfortable. But for all that, it’s a very enjoyable read, and the incisive writing really does support her selection as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.
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A Spool of Blue Thread By Anne Tyler
There is something so simple and yet so effective in the way Anne Tyler writes about families and home life. The grown Whitshank children are so used to hearing their mother describe the day she fell in love with their father that they can almost recite the tale along with her. And yet, there is a comfort and a joy to be found in hearing this familiar tale, and in seeing that their parents love for each other remains undimmed after the decades. So when Abby Whitshank begins to wander, the adult siblings act quickly to make sure she will be well taken care of in her own home. The years that have passed so quickly are recalled by the parents and their children, and a few unexpected secrets are revealed. There is much love here, but also the expected amount of family squabbles and childhood rivalries that never really went away. Tyler has said this will be her last novel, which seems a terrible shame. She is a writer, you feel, who still has much to offer.
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One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
The most frightening thing about Asne Seierstad’s riveting investigation into the shocking Norwegian mass killing of 2011 – when more than 70 teenagers were gunned down at a political summer camp – is not the massacre itself but the fact that Anders Breivik was free to carry it out. It’s not as if there hadn’t been red flags raised about his behavior. Social services were concerned enough to attempt to remove him from his mother’s custody several times during his childhood, but somehow he was left to live in this highly dysfunctional home. In his teenage years he showed early signs of the cruelty he would later display on the fateful day. Seierstad has taken an extraordinary event and managed to elevate it into an art form in this extremely powerful book. It reads like a novel, and she expertly sets the stage, introducing us to Breivik and his family, and to some of the youngsters whose loss on Utoya would have a devastating effect on so many families. I would expect all sorts of prizes and awards for the author, it is as electrifying an account of a true crime as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and that title would fit just as well.
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Contact Information
Darina Molloy, Castlebar Central Library, John Moore Rd, Castlebar, Co. Mayo. Email: dmolloy@mayococo.ie Phone: +353 (0)94 9047953
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