The Children Act By Ian McEwan
High Court judge Fiona Maye, known for her cool hand at the helm and her sensitivity in delicate matters, is utterly floored when her husband of thirty years drops a bombshell into their neat, orderly and well-connected life together. But regardless of her imploding personal circumstances, she is still needed to dispense her Solomon-like wisdom into other people’s lives. Firstly, she must assess whether two Jewish schoolgirls should stay with their strictly observant father or be allowed to live with their mother, who has gone against her community in seeking an education and to work outside the home. But it is the case of terminally ill teenager Adam which resonates the most with the judge. He is just shy of his eighteenth birthday, and is refusing potentially life-saving treatment on religious grounds. Justice Maye, who is customarily addressed in court as ‘My Lady’, visits the youth in hospital to assess whether he is being coerced or refusing treatment of his own free will. McEwan is at his cool, measured best here – neither the author nor his main character is the type to throw hissy fits or over-indulge in too much melodrama.
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The Bone Clocks By David Mitchell
David Mitchell’s ability to transcend worlds and mess with the ordinary, every-day chronology of time is an endearing aspect of his hard-to-describe fiction. He did it in Cloud Atlas, in number9dream, and has done it again in this latest riotous ensemble. The Bone Clocks is hard to describe, and indeed over analyzing it too much would probably tend to put readers off rather than encourage them to dive in. But that’s exactly what a Mitchell book needs – a big, body-slamming dive and total immersion into a world quite unlike any others you have visited. When stroppy teenager Holly Sykes huffs out of her parents’ house, and decides her mother needs a good scare after their latest screaming match, she has no idea of the train of events she has set in motion. Through the rest of the book, she is the touchstone Mitchell returns to time and again, as he gives the reader a glimpse of how her life has progressed. His view of the world some thirty years hence is as dystopian as anything Cormac McCarthy has touched on, and the terrifying glimpse of rural Ireland in 2043 is enough to make anyone switch to sustainable living immediately.
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Nora Webster By Colm Toibin
Eilis Lacey, the main character in Colm Toibin’s bestseller Brooklyn, is mentioned briefly in the opening pages of his newest tale (though there have been a few in-between), and thus he cleverly sets the scene for a novel that is similar in many ways, though also very individual in its own right. While Nora Webster is a quiet, understated novel in which nothing very much happens, Nora the character is quite the force of nature in her own little world. With characters so real they could step off the page and into the reader’s world and we would know them instantly, the story resonates deeply. In deep mourning for her dead husband, Nora finds it difficult to continue raising her two young sons, and accepts that she will have to leave the security of her home and return to a work life she left behind several years earlier. Toibin writes beautifully about grief and loss, and the mark it leaves on a person who would just prefer to be left to get on with things. This is a keenly-observed tale of a complex woman, and is sure to do every bit as well as Brooklyn did.
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The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair By Joel Dicker
Weighing in at a hefty 614 pages, this is quite the meta novel – a book about a book, featuring an author riding on the coat-tails of another author. With flashbacks to 1975, the year in which a struggling author named Harry Quebert fell in love with a 15-year-old girl, and what happened after she subsequently disappeared, the story is centered around the discovery of Nola Kellergan’s body in Harry Quebert’s yard. She has been buried with a manuscript copy of the book that made his name forever, and he is obviously the prime suspect. But his protégé Marcus Goldman, who has been crippled by extreme writer’s block since his own precocious literary debut, is resolved to clear his mentor’s name and prove who really killed Nola. Needless to say, in this age of instant fame and 24/7 news cycles, his search for the truth proves to be the story du jour. While it’s a book that is worth reading, it does perhaps labour the point at times, and could have done with being a couple of hundred pages shorter.
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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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