Tag: Irish literature

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Adrian Duncan, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, Setting, Tuskar Rock Press

‘The Geometer Lobachevsky’ by Adrian Duncan

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Tuskar Rock; 166 pages; 2022.

When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology.

It’s not every day you read a novel that is about surveying, peat extraction, electricity generation and exile — so full points to Berlin-based Irish writer Adrian Duncan for originality!

A Russian emigré in Ireland

The Geometer Lobachevsky, which has been shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize and the 2023 Kerry Group Novel of the Year, is a unique story about a Russian man, Nikolai Lobachevsky, who finds himself in Ireland helping survey a peatland bog in the Midlands.

It is 1950, and Ireland is embarking on a new era of state-powered electricity generation inspired by the Soviet’s expertise in this subject area.

I am standing on the edge of a bog. There is wind. And sky meeting arm-opening land.

But Nikolai finds the work challenging, not because he can’t do it, but because his Irish counterparts don’t seem to understand the fundamental problems associated with measuring a landscape that moves and swells depending on its ever-changing water content.

His attempts to add rigour and mathematical accuracy to the process are viewed as comical and at odds with normal Irish conventions which is to just get things done with as little effort as possible (hence the quote above which refers to “anthropology”).

Exiled on an island

Not that it matters much in the long run, for Nikolai goes into hiding when he receives a letter calling him back to Leningrad to take up a “special appointment”.

In the pit of my stomach bubbles a pool of bile; I want to take a match to this pool, light it and burn it way, then take the match to what remains.

He reinvents himself as a Polish ex-POW who has discovered God and moves to an island on the Shannon estuary. Here he falls in with four devoutly Catholic Irish families and immerses themselves in their lives.

I live on the northern edge of this island of barely 300 acres, amid the hedges and pastures, in a gatehouse once owned by a member of what they call ‘the landed gentry’.

Eventually, the pull of his family back home, and the desire to see their faces for one last time, has him return to Russia — against his better judgement.

Strange and evocative tale

The Geometer Lobachevsky is an extraordinarily strange yet eerily evocative novel. The descriptions of landscapes and places are lush and cinematic.

References to mathematics infuse the text to remind us that Nikolai — the fictional grandson of the famous 19th-century Russian mathematician of the same name — is a geometer who sees everything around him through the lens of shapes and angles and numbers. It’s a neat touch.

But for all the descriptive language, and even the political commentary (which seems to suggest there was incompetency, corruption and violence within Ireland’s electricity industry as it was being set up), the narrative lacks propulsion. I kept wondering where the story was headed and didn’t much care in the end whether Nikolai lived or died.

It’s a book of moods, intrigue and vivid imagery. But I need more than that to truly fall in love with a story.

This is my fourth book from the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year shortlist. I am trying to read them all (there are five) before the winner is named at the end of May.

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Aingeala Flannery, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories

‘The Amusements’ by Aingeala Flannery

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 223 pages; 2022.

Aingeala Flannery’s The Amusements is a collection of loosely connected short stories set in Tramore, a traditional seaside town in County Waterford, on the southeast coast of Ireland, famed for its fairground and long beach.

There’s a distinct William Trevor “vibe” about the tales of small-town lives depicted here, so I felt validated to discover, via the author’s Acknowledgements, that she was inspired by Trevor’s work, explaining that his story Honeymoon in Tramore “set me off on a flight of fancy”.

The way Flannery explores the interconnectedness of people living in the same small community, where everyone knows everyone else, where people bear grudges and are suspicious of “blow-ins”, comes right out of Trevor’s “school of writing”. Even her characters — life-like, flawed and shaped by their local community — could have stepped out of his pages.

But that’s not to say her work is derivative; it’s not. The Amusements is a highly original, closely observed portrait of a town and its residents, both permanent and fleeting, and the ways in which their lives intersect over the course of 30 or so years.

Interconnected stories

There are 16 stories in total and most are framed around the Swaine family headed by bitter matriarch Nancy who never has a nice word to say about anyone.

My sister says our mother is ‘spitting venom’. I can’t tell any more if Tish is trying to warn me, or to guilt me. Seems to me Nancy always spat venom, was always out with somebody: Auntie Stasia, the next-door neighbour, my brother Michael and his ‘appalling’ wife. It’s not easy to stay in with a person whose default position is disapproval.

We first meet Nancy in “Star of the Sea” when she’s a widowed mother who breaks up her teenage daughter Stella’s close friendship with budding photographer Helen Grant. She appears again in “Making Friends” when she has a serious falling out with her new neighbour Vonnie Jacob. Later, in “Home” Nancy is residing in an aged-care facility and her now-adult daughter Stella —who has moved to London via New York —  returns to Tramore on a flying visit to see her. In “The Reason I’m Calling” she is dying, aged 68, and by “Woodbine” she has passed away.

Her children, Tish and Stella, star in separate stories: Tish is married to a “good husband” and has a young daughter, Evie, but seems harassed and discontent with her lot; Stella, who moved away to become an artist, lives an unconventional life and hates returning home to Tramore because it just reminds her of all the reasons she fled in the first place.

Brilliant characters

Other subsidiary characters from the town — such as the butcher Thaddeus Burke, the public health nurse Jenny Supple and the bed-and-breakfast landlady Muriel Power — are also featured. Many of these characters move from one tale to another, and events which happen in one story are concluded, or referenced, in the next. But there are also a few that end abruptly and don’t seem to add much to the overarching narrative, and I would question their inclusion.

Tramore is also a character in its own right, a place that comes alive in summer as a bustling tourist hot spot, but dies down in winter when the amusement arcades close and the fairground rides shut down.

But regardless of the season, idle gossip, reputational crises and personal struggles abound. Anyone who has lived in a small town or close-knit community will recognise the people in these pages.

The Amusements is a terrifically entertaining read, brimming with life in all its messy, chaotic complexity. It has been shortlisted for this year’s Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

This is my third book from the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year shortlist. I am trying to read them all (there are five) before the winner is named at the end of May.

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Anya Bergman, Author, Book review, Fiction, historical fiction, Literary prizes, Manilla Press, Norway, Publisher, Setting

‘The Witches of Vardø’ by Anya Bergman

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Fiction – paperback; Manilla Press; 385 pages; 2023.

In the winter of 1662-63, a total of 20 women died during the witch trials which took place on the island of Vardø, located in the extreme northeastern part of Norway, far above the Arctic Circle. The women had been put on trial for “making pacts with the devil”. Eighteen of them were burnt at the stake and two were tortured to death.

Anya Begman’s novel The Witches of Vardø is a fictionalised account of what happened. The characters are inspired by real people whose experiences are documented in court testimonies.

In writing the book, the author, who lived in Norway for a time, says her purpose was to “raise the lost voices of the women accused of witchcraft with tenderness while invigorating their seventeenth-century history with contemporary resonance”.

Dual storyline

I don’t tend to read historical fiction set earlier than the 19th century, so this novel took me right out of my comfort zone. It reads very much like a fable or old-fashioned tale, with lots of tell and not a huge amount of show, but once I got into the rhythm of the story (it’s a slow burn), I quite enjoyed it.

The narrative comprises two storylines told in alternate chapters from two different points of view. Both highlight the very real dangers of being female in a patriarchal society where men controlled every facet of a woman’s life, restricting them to domestic (and sexual) servitude.

Anna Rhodius, the daughter of a physician and a talented healer herself, was once the King of Denmark’s mistress. She has been banished to Vardø but she’s eager to return to her life of privilege and will do almost anything she can to go back to it, even if that means helping to prosecute other women for witchcraft.

Ingeborg Sigvaldsdatter is the teenage daughter of Zigri, a woman accused of witchcraft when her affair with a local merchant is discovered. Accompanied by Maren, another teenager whose mother has already been condemned as a witch, Ingeborg makes a long and treacherous journey to Vardø to try to rescue her mother who has been locked up in the governor’s fortress.

Anna’s story is told in the first person in a series of letters she addresses to the King, pleading to be reinstated in his eyes; Ingeborg’s is in the third person and takes a wider view, showing how her life was forever altered when her fisherman father and brother were lost at sea, leaving behind a wife and two daughters who were plunged into grief and struggled to find enough to eat.

Their stories are interleaved with folktales, including those of the Sámi people, and the mysterious appearance of a lynx with golden eyes.

Plot-driven story

The Witches of Vardø is a largely plot-driven novel that charts events leading up to and including Zigri’s trial.

It moves at a relatively slow pace and there’s a lot of detail (about Ingeborg’s journey and Anna’s past affair), which sometimes feels laboured. But the writing is atmospheric, chilly and Gothic by turn. The depictions of romantic love and the betrayals that can sometimes come with it are beautifully evoked.

Unsurprisingly, the witch trial that forms the climax of the novel is powerful and violent, but the aftermath, in which Maren and Ingeborg escape to lead lives of their own feels redemptive — and hopeful.

For another take on this novel, please see this review at Theresa Smith Writes.

A lasting memorial

By Stylegar – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47091822

Just to hammer home the point that the witch trials were a real thing, these photographs show the Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, which commemorates the 91 victims who were convicted of witchcraft and executed in Finnmark in the 17th century. A collaboration between the artist Louise Bourgeois and the architect Peter Zumthor, it comprises a 125m memorial hall (above) and a burning chair (below).

You can read more about the memorial at this Norwegian tourist website (note, it’s in Norwegian but you can translate it) or via this Wikipedia page.

By Bjarne Riesto – https://www.flickr.com/photos/eager/13571909504, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48501399

This is my second book from the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year shortlist. I am trying to read them all (there are five) before the winner is named at the end of May.

Book lists

10 years of favourite reads from the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year shortlists

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At the end of this month, the winner of the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year will be named at Listowel Writers’ Week.

This annual award for Irish writers of fiction was established in 1995 — and the list of alumni reads like a roll call of Ireland’s best contemporary writers, including everyone from Deidre Madden to John Banville. (You can see the list of winners on this Wikipedia page.)

I’ve been following the prize closely since 2017, but I was first made aware of it in 2012 when I read the winner, Christine Dwyer Hickey’s exceedingly good The Cold Eye of Heaven. In fact, I read three other books from that year’s shortlist — Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, Carlo Gebler’s The Dead Eight and Belinda McKeon’s Solace — and loved them all.

Over the years, the shortlists have provided me with rich pickings and acted as a faithful guide to the best crop of Irish novels released in a particular year. I thought it might be useful to put together a list of my favourites from the past decade.

If you’re not sure where to start with Irish literature or just want to read something entertaining and well-written, this list of 18 novels should provide inspiration. It has been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname. Click on the book’s title to read my review in full.

‘The Blue Guitar’ by John Banville (shortlisted in 2016)

A pompous, self-obsessed Irish artist looks back — in forensic detail — on the love affair he carried out with his best friend’s wife. Richly immersive.

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

‘Beatlebone’ by Kevin Barry (shortlisted in 2016)

A Liverpudlian named John goes on a riotous adventure to the uninhabited Irish island he bought years ago but has never visited. A riotous romp full of unexpected surprises.

‘Night Boat to Tangier’ by Kevin Barry (shortlisted 2020)

Two Irish gangsters reminisce about their topsy-turvy lives as drug dealers while they wait for someone to get off the night boat at the Spanish port of Algeciras. Blackly comic.

‘A Ladder to the Sky’ by John Boyne (shortlisted 2019)

A would-be writer hellbent on topping the bestseller lists resorts to criminality in the pursuit of fame and glory. Riotously good fun.

My Name is Leon

‘My Name is Leon’ by Kit de Waal (winner 2017)

A mixed-race nine-year-old boy is separated from his younger brother when he is taken into foster care. Bittersweet and heartbreaking.

‘Bright Burning Things’ by Lisa Harding (shortlisted 2022)

A former stage actress with a young son begins to hear paranoid voices in her head that she can only alleviate with alcohol. Tense and compelling with a truly distinctive voice.

‘Small Things Like These’ by Claire Keegan (winner 2022)

Hard-working coal merchant Bill Furlong uncovers a disturbing secret at the local convent run by the Good Shepherd nuns. A short, powerful read.

The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy

‘The Devil I Know’ by Claire Kilroy (shortlisted 2013)

Tristram St Lawrence, 13th Earl of Howth, gives evidence at a public inquiry into the collapse of the Irish economy. Darkly comic morality tale.

‘Time Present and Time Past’ by Deirdre Madden (shortlisted 2014)

A pair of 40-something siblings negotiate complicated family histories. Understated and hugely enjoyable.

‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’ by Eimear McBride (winner 2014)

A young woman explores her relationship with an older brother, who suffers a brain tumour in childhood that later returns when he is a young man. Devastating and unique.

‘TransAtlantic’ by Colum McCann (shortlisted 2014)

One-hundred and fifty years of Irish history explored through a handful of seminal real-life characters — British aviators, an abolitionist and an American politician — together with three generations of fictional women from the same family. Bold and ambitious.

Solar Bones

‘Solar Bones’ by Mike McCormack (shortlisted 2017)

Civil engineer Marcus Conway stands in his kitchen and thinks about his life and what it is to be a good man. Audacious and unforgettable.

‘Midwinter Break’ by Bernard McLaverty (shortlisted 2018)

Gerry and Stella’s long marriage begins to unravel on a long weekend trip to Amsterdam. Intimate and moving.

‘The Closet Of Savage Mementos’ by Nuala Ní Chonchúir (shortlisted 2015)

A woman looks back on the time she took a summer job in Scotland and fell in love with a much older man who changed her life forever. Evocative and emotional.

‘Shadowplay’ by Joseph O’Connor (shortlisted 2020)

Struggling writer Bram Stoker runs the Lyceum Theatre in 1870s London, where he joins forces with theatre director Henry Irving and leading actress Ellen Terry, and marries a renowned English beauty Florence Balcombe. Full of Gothic atmosphere.

‘Nora’ by Nuala O’Connor (shortlisted 2022)

Nora Barnacle falls in love with writer James Joyce, becomes his muse and flees Ireland with him. Bold and bawdy.

Travelling in a strange land

‘Travelling in a Strange Land’ by David Park (winner 2019)

A newly bereaved parent drives across England in a snowstorm to collect his sole surviving son from university to bring him home to Belfast. Contemplative and beautiful.

‘Bina’ by Anakana Schofield (winner 2021)

An elderly Irish woman gives shelter to a man who refuses to leave. Completely bonkers and bitterly funny.

Have you read any of these books? Or have any piqued your interest?

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Publisher, Setting

‘The Lock-Up’ by John Banville

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Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 352 pages; 2023.

I was looking forward to John Banville’s latest historical crime novel, The Lock-Up, and did a little jump for joy when I saw it on the shelves of my local independent bookstore where I purchased it last weekend.

I adored the first two in the series — Snow (2020) and April in Spain (2021) — because Banville so expertly marries historical fiction with a dash of crime and loads of literary flair. The result? Intriguing atmospheric tales that are primarily character-driven (rather than plot-driven) and hugely fun to read.

Set in Dublin in the 1950s, the series — billed as “a Strafford and Quirke mystery” — stars Detective Inspector St. John Strafford and the Dublin-based pathologist Quirke. (Banville aficionados will know that Quirke has his own series, penned under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, which began with Christine Falls in 2006.)

Putting these two characters together in the same series is a feat of genius because the tension between them allows Banville to explore the prejudices in Irish society at the time (Quirke is Catholic; Strafford is Protestant). He can also use their different professional skills to build a crime-fighting duo akin to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.

Six months after Spain

In this story, set six months after the last book, a young Jewish woman, Rosa Jacobs, is found gassed in her car, which is kept in a local lock-up (hence the book’s title). Everyone assumes she has killed herself, but when Quirke discovers evidence she was gagged, a murder investigation is set in motion.

This investigation, led by Strafford under the direction of his soon-to-be-retired Chief Inspector Hackett, struggles to uncover any immediate leads. Yet Rosa was outspoken and campaigned for contraception and abortion so it’s likely someone wanted to keep her quiet, but who?

The plot focuses mainly on Rosa’s links with Kesler, a wealthy German industrialist, who trains racehorses in County Wicklow, and his son. Kesler has business dealings in Israel and a journalist he knew there had recently been killed in a hit-and-run. Is this death connected to Rosa’s? And if so, how?

Not just crime 

The Lock-Up isn’t strictly a police procedural, and the crime, especially the way it is linked to other events, stretches credulity a little. As ironic as it sounds, I’ve come to realise you don’t read Banville’s crime books for the crime component. You read them for the lush prose, his brilliant similies and his scene-setting. He’s especially adept at writing about weather, for instance, and in this book, set on the cusp of autumn, it is blowing a gale throughout.

Rather than focus primarily on the plot, Banville is more interested in fleshing out his characters, exploring the complexities of their lives and highlighting how the often unseen forces of religion and politics shape decisions and outcomes.

The historical elements are nicely done. The story is set in 1957 at a time when the Catholic Church ruled almost every facet of Irish life and where a phone call from the Bishop could end a career — or put paid to a well-earned police pension (as Hackett comes to fear when pressure is put on him to steer the investigation in a certain way).

The role of the Church in harbouring Nazis or helping them to escape also forms a shadowy backdrop. Indeed, in the first part of the novel, which is set in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, an Irish monk helps a Nazi gain safe passage by sheltering him in a monastery in the Alto Adige in Northern Italy. When the story then jumps forward by more than a decade, it feels disjointed, but everything falls into place by the time you get to the end.

Insightful interactions

It’s the interactions between Qurike and Strafford that make The Lock-Up such a compelling read because it’s the little jibes and subtle digs between them that reveal their personalities and prejudices.

Both men are deeply flawed characters and carry out extra-curricular activities that might raise eyebrows. Strafford lacks the backbone to ask if his wife, who has seemingly left him, is ever coming back but has the courage to ask Quirke’s adult daughter, Phoebe, out on a date; Quirke, newly bereaved (you will have to read April in Spain to find out why), is hitting the bottle one minute and hitting on women the next. To see these men fumble around, looking for ways to make meaningful human contact, to quell their loneliness and the stresses of the job, makes for an authentic read.

Of course, everything is nicely tied up at the end — but not in the ways you might think.

Finally, The Lock-Up can be read as a standalone, but I suspect the reading experience is all the richer if you have read the earlier novels. There are occasional throwback references to incidences and characters from the Quirke series of novels which, when you spot them, are delicious little treats. I imagine Banville has a lot of fun writing these books. I certainly have fun reading them.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘The Children of Dynmouth’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 195 pages; 2014.

The first Sunday of the month means it’s time to review another William Trevor book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with Cathy from 746 Books.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up his 1976 novel The Children of Dynmouth, but it didn’t take long for me to feel that I was on familiar William Trevor turf in which he takes a seemingly ordinary character with eccentric traits and lets them loose in a confined setting, such as a pub (Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel), boarding house (Miss Gomez and the Brethren) or hospital ward (Elizabeth Alone), to see what will unfold. 

In this case, it’s a lonely teenage boy called Timothy Gedge, who is obsessed with a serial killer from the past, and the setting is a small village where everyone knows everyone else and therefore can’t escape or ignore the lad. 

A personality transformation

Initially, Timothy comes across as friendly and helpful, even charming. He’s quite comfortable around adults and able to engage in proper conversations with them. And the adults in the small coastal town of Dynmouth seem happy to have him around to help with odd jobs and errands.

He’d seemed an engagingly eccentric child, solitary in spite of his chattering and smiling, different from other children. 

But as the narrative progresses it becomes clear that Timothy is socially intrusive, can’t take no for an answer and gets on people’s nerves. In the case of two 12-year-olds, Kate and Stephen, whom he befriends, his cloying attentiveness terrifies them. In fact, Kate believes he is “possessed by devils” and runs crying to the local reverend demanding he do something about it.

If you believed he was possessed, she whispered between her sobs, everything was explained.

Timothy’s transformation from a well-meaning teenager to a person who frightens others through inappropriate and unwelcome behaviour forms the heart of this very fine novel.

Search for fame

It all begins with the promise of an Easter talent show in the village. Timothy has big plans to be the stand-out act. He daydreams about TV presenter Hughie Green discovering him and putting him on the TV show Opportunity Knocks.

He starts to badger local villagers for the props he requires, which include a pair of curtains, a bathtub and a wedding dress. That’s because his act is going to be based on the English serial killer George Joseph Smith who became infamous for his “brides in the bath” murders in the early 1900s.

His frequent hassling of people for the bits and bobs he needs turns him into a serious pest. But most villagers are too polite to tell him to go away. They tolerate him — up to a point.

Mr Plant, the local publican, who agrees to let him take an old tin bath rusting in the back yard, wonders if Timothys’s mother had “dropped the boy when he was a baby”:

You heard that kind of thing, a kid’s head striking the edge of something when the kid was a couple of months old and the kid never being normal. […] The Gedge boy seemed intent on something […] with a gruesome flavour, murders taking place in a bath. Sick they called it nowadays, and sick it most certainly was. In his entire life, he estimated, he’d never heard anything like it.

The village spy

While Timothy’s motivations are never fully explained (that isn’t Trevor’s style; he leaves it to his readers to work things out for themselves), his behaviour changes over time. He becomes increasingly obsessed with murders and murderers, particularly within marriage. 

When he spies on neighbours he often sees things he shouldn’t, and when he reveals these closely guarded secrets he is oblivious to the harm he may cause. 

He looked in people’s windows […] He followed people about. He listened to people’s conversations. He harassed people with jokes that weren’t funny.

His vivid imagination often runs away with him and he puts two and two together to come up with five. The consequences of this go beyond just a little harmless tittle-tattle…

Common themes

Of the early Trevor novels I have now read, The Children of Dynmouth is probably my favourite. While he explores many of the same themes — marginalised people in a world that doesn’t quite know how to deal with them, the nature of evil and madness, and the tragicomic absurdity of life — this one really ratchets up the tension and the narrative doesn’t necessarily go in the direction you think it might.

The machinations of small-town life and the interconnectedness of residents are paramount. In fact, Dynmouth, nestled on the Dorset coast, with its curving promenade, modest pier and grey-brown cliffs, is a character in its own right.

His human characters are, as ever, brilliantly realised — and it is through their relationship with Timothy that we see them being tested and pushed to the limits. Who will crack first? Will it be the kindly vicar Mr Featherstone or his wife Lavinia who runs the local nursery? Perhaps Commander Abigail and his long-suffering wife, who invite Timothy to supper once a week, will be the ones to finally tell him to go away and never come back. Or maybe Mr and Mrs Blakley, who are minding step-siblings Kate and Stephen while their newly married parents are off on honeymoon, will step up to the mark.

The Children of Dynmouth won the Whitbread Award (the precursor to the Costa Book Awards) in 1976. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that same year. Apparently, it was also adapted for BBC Two in 1987. (I’m not sure I’d want to see it.)

For other takes on this novel, please see reviews by Cathy at 746 books, Jacqui at Jacqui’s Wine Journal and Ali at HeavenAli.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

♥ This month  Cathy reviewed ‘Nights at the Alexandra’.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘Felicia’s Journey’ and I plan to review the short story collection ‘A Bit on the Side’.

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Literary prizes

The 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award shortlist

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Farewell Stella Prize reading season, hello Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award reading season!

Yes, no sooner does one literary prize announce its winner than another reveals a shortlist — albeit on opposite sides of the world! My favourite literary prize — the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, which I’ve been following since 2017 — has unveiled its shortlist^^ of five novels.

This award, which is worth €20,000 to the winner, has previously introduced me to some very fine Irish fiction, including Nuala O’Connor’s Nora, Lisa Harding’s Bright Burning Things, Anakana Schofield’s Bina and Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier. In fact, I don’t think I have ever come across a dud novel shortlisted for this prize.

Last year, Claire Keegan won the award for her novella Small Things Like These.

This year’s judges, Patrick Gale and Manveen Rana, have a lot to live up to! They have selected five novels (from more than 50 submitted), which all look tempting. I’ve previously read one, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, and I have The Colony and The Amusements on my TBR already, so my usual mission to read everything on the shortlist should be straightforward.

Here’s the shortlist, arranged in alphabetical order by author surname, with the publisher’s synopsis underneath:

‘The Witches of Vardø’ by Anya Bergman

Norway, 1662. A dangerous time to be a woman, when even dancing can lead to accusations of witchcraft. After recently widowed Zigri’s affair with the local merchant is discovered, she is sent to the fortress at Vardø to be tried as a witch. Zigri’s daughter Ingeborg sets off into the wilderness to try to bring her mother back home. Accompanying her on this quest is Maren – herself the daughter of a witch – whose wild nature and unconquerable spirit gives Ingeborg the courage to venture into the unknown, and to risk all she has to save her family. Also captive in the fortress is Anna Rhodius, once the King of Denmark’s mistress, who has been sent in disgrace to the island of Vardø. What will she do – and who will she betray – to return to her privileged life at court? These Witches of Vardø are stronger than even the King. In an age weighted against them, they refuse to be victims. They will have their justice. All they need do is show their power.

‘The Geometer Lobachevsky’ by Adrian Duncan

It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a ‘special appointment’. Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.

‘The Amusements’ by Aingeala Flannery

In the seaside town of Tramore, County Waterford, visitors arrive in waves with the tourist season, reliving the best days of their childhoods in its caravan parks, chippers and amusement arcades. Local teenager Helen Grant is indifferent to the charm of her surroundings; she dreams of escaping to art college with her glamorous classmate Stella Swaine and, from there, taking on the world. But leaving Tramore is easier said than done. Though they don’t yet know it, Helen and Stella’s lives are pulled by tides beyond their control. Following the Grant and Swaine families and their neighbours over three decades, The Amusements is a luminous and unforgettable story about roads taken and not taken – and a brilliantly observed portrait of a small-town community.

‘Trespasses’ by Louise Kennedy

There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever. As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together. Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

‘The Colony’ by Audrey Magee

He handed the easel to the boatman, reaching down the pier wall towards the sea. Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without an engine – the authentic experience. Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place – one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve. But the people who live on this rock – three miles long and half a mile wide – have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Soft summer days pass, and the islanders are forced to question what they value and what they desire. As the autumn beckons, and the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.

Do keep coming back to this post as I will update the hyperlinks as and when I review each title.

You can read more about the prize via the official announcement.

Have you read any of these novels? Or is there anything on the list that particularly intrigues you?

^^ No longlist is announced for this annual prize. Instead, a shortlist is revealed about a month before Listowel Writers’ Week — Ireland’s oldest literary festival — and the winner is named on the opening night of the festival. This year the festival runs from 31st May to 4th June.

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Author, Bloomsbury Circus, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Louise Kennedy, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting

‘Trespasses’ by Louise Kennedy

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Bloomsbury Circus; 320 pages; 2022.

Winner of the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2022 and shortlisted for a slew of other awards, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses is the tale of a doomed love affair set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.

Every second person in the world seems to have read it — and loved it. But as much as I enjoyed it on a superficial level, I found the storyline predictable and cliched.

At one point, Cushla Lavery, the main character, tells her lover: “This is going to end badly, isn’t it?” And I wondered why it had taken her so long to figure it out because when a young woman falls for an older married man it never really ends well.

Throw in the complexities of their religious divide — she’s Catholic, he’s Protestant — class differences and a bloody and violent sectarian war playing out around them, then the chance of a happy-ever-after seems particularly far-fetched. But maybe I’m being harsh — or too cynical.

A secret affair

The main story is about Cushla’s clandestine relationship with Michael Agnew, an older married man she meets in the “garrison town” pub owned by her family. She’s from working-class Catholic stock and teaches at the local primary school. He’s an Ulster protestant and works as a criminal barrister in Belfast.

But there are subsidiary storylines that showcase other aspects of Cushla’s life and go some way to explain why she’s embarked on a forbidden relationship.

These include looking after her widowed mother, Gina, who is an alcoholic and sometimes can’t even get out of bed she’s so drunk or hungover; working evenings in the pub run by her brother Eamonn and having to serve the clientele, some of which are British soldiers; and taking an outside interest in the care of one of her young students, seven-year-old Davy McGeown, whose father is the victim of a particularly vicious attack by paramilitaries. This all place demands on her time and her inner resources, so that there is little left for her; she’s too busy mothering everyone else.

Did Cushla fancy Michael because he was the only man she knew who didn’t talk incessantly about his mummy?

A friendship with a male teacher, Gerry Devlin, who many think is her boyfriend, acts as a convenient cover. But many of her rendezvous with Michael happen out in the open when he draws her into his sophisticated circle of friends by inviting her along to teach them the Irish language.

One-sided relationship

But right from the start the relationship is one-sided and we know next to nothing about Michael, except that he has had many affairs and he’s the one that calls the shots:

He would never give her more than this. For her there would just be liaisons arranged an hour or two in advance, couplings in lay-bys, evenings at his friends’ house under unconvincing pretexts. When her thoughts flitted – briefly – to his wife, the guilt at what she was doing to her did not take.

What makes their relationship seem even more reckless is the frisson of danger that infects the whole city in an “unspeakable war”. The threat of death, from bombs and guns, is on every page. Some chapters open with a series of news headlines — about deadly explosions and arrests and caches of weapons being found — to hammer home the point that this affair is happening in a war zone.

This death and violence are so normalised that the pair never discuss how Michael’s job paints him as a terrorist target…

As a story of a woman navigating multiple battlefields, Trespasses is an entertaining read.

It’s largely told as a series of vignettes, with the affair underpinning the narrative. But because I knew exactly where that narrative was headed, some of the vignettes felt like filler. That said, the denouement is suitably powerful and shocking and leaves a lasting impression.

I liked the book, I just didn’t love it.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘Shadows on Our Skin’ by Jennifer Johnston: through the eyes of a young Derry schoolboy, this gently nuanced novel shows what it is like to grow up while The Troubles rage around you.

‘Lies of Silence’ by Brian Moore: A heart-hammering tale set during The Troubles in which the IRA orders a hotel manager to park a car in the hotel’s car park. If he refuses, his wife, who has been taken captive, will be murdered.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth23, which runs throughout March. I’m a little behind so that’s why this review is more than a week late. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Update 1 May 2023: This book has been shortlisted for the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. I am attempting to read all the books on the shortlist before the winner is announced at the end of May. This qualifies as the first book read (out of a total of five).

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, William Trevor

‘Elizabeth Alone’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 318 pages; 2015.

I’m unsure what to make of Elizabeth Alone, William Trevor’s seventh novel.

The blurb on my edition is misleading because it sounds like it’s the story of a divorced woman — the Elizabeth of the title — coming to terms with her new circumstances. And while that does form part of the story,  Elizabeth isn’t the central figure in the novel.

In fact, there’s no central figure. Instead, there’s a wide cast of protagonists whose lives are drawn together when they meet, albeit briefly, in the Cheltenham Street Women’s Hospital in London.

Multiple characters

Those protagonists include:

  • Elizabeth (or Mrs Aidallbery, as she is sometimes known), who has been admitted to undergo a hysterectomy, while her 17-year-old daughter Joanne runs off to a commune in Somerset and two younger daughters remain in the care of a Russian housekeeper
  • newlywed Sylvie Clapper, whose Irish husband, Declan, is an unreliable chancer and possible conman
  • the devoutly religious Miss Samson, who has never married because she has a crimson-coloured birthmark on her face that affects her left eye
  • Lily Drucker, who is pregnant but confined to bed because she’s had four miscarriages in the past — she also has a problematic relationship with her overbearing mother-in-law.

There are other subsidiary characters, including Elizabeth’s husband, who now resides in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is dating an American woman, and her old school friend, Henry, a “heavy dog-like man with an elaborately freckled face”, who brews his own beer and fixes vending machines.

And then there’s Kenneth, Lily’s husband, who makes a startling confession to his parents — that he used to sleep with prostitutes — to shock his mother into keeping her distance.

And, of course, there are the sisters on the ward, including Sister O’Keefe, “a woman of fifty-one, from Kinsale in Co. Cork, of medium height, plumply made, with a round plain face and blue eyes that reflected sometimes her devotion to the work she had chosen”.

If ever a novel needed a dramatis personae, this was it — there are so many characters in Elizabeth Alone, I found it challenging to keep track of who was who. But Trevor uses this to his advantage, by having characters who might never meet in real life, come together in the institutional setting of the hospital.

Multiple settings and storylines

A secondary setting — the King of England pub — also provides more opportunities for the male characters to meet and interact. Together, this provides ample opportunity to create moments of pure farce (in the pub), and other moments filled with pathos and regret (in the hospital). But there are so many narrative threads and storylines, the book doesn’t hang together as a whole. It’s not a collection of short stories per se, but it certainly tips a nod in that direction.

Interestingly, Elizabeth Alone does feature what I’ve now come to recognise as Trevor’s trademarks: eccentric, slightly mad characters; lonely, often middle-aged men or women; people who are unhappy in their marriage or unlucky in love; constant references to sex pests or men who sleep with prostitutes; petty thieves, conmen and nefarious people; pubs, booze and drunks; orphans or people who have had troubled childhoods; and religious fervour.

These are serious themes but everything is written through a tragicomic lens to add a lightness of touch — and some pure laugh-out-loud moments. 

If you’ve not read William Trevor before, this probably isn’t the one to start with, but diehard fans will likely appreciate it.

Elizabeth Alone was first published in 1973.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

♥ This month  Cathy reviewed ‘The Hill Bachelors’

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘Nights at the Alexandra’ and I plan to review ‘The Children of Dynmouth’.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Sara Baume, Setting, Tramp Press

‘Seven Steeples’ by Sara Baume

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Tramp Press; 288 pages; 2022.

The rhythms of nature and the passing of time are the central themes in Sara Baume’s latest novel Seven Steeples.

Set over the course of seven years, it tells the quiet, contemplative story of Bell (Isabel) and Sigh (Simon), who both ditch their menial city jobs — Bell waiting tables, Sigh packaging TVs in a factory — to move into a rental house, “a drab, roofed box girdled by countryside” at the bottom of a mountain.

They bring their two dogs — Pip, a lurcher, and Voss, a terrier — with them and live a simple life supported by social welfare payments and dwindling savings.

After the excitement of moving in together for the first time (the pair met at a party), taking minimal furniture and an odd assortment of belongings with them, their lives quickly settle into a routine. Morning walks. Trips to the nearest town for supplies. The occasional spot of gardening.

A quiet, misanthropic life

Their nearest neighbour, a farmer, has a nodding acquaintance with them, but for the most part, they keep themselves to themselves. They make no friends and they deliberately cut ties with everyone they know in the city.

Four years and seven months passed without a single visitor.

And as time passes, they carry next to no upkeep on the house, whether inside or out, and it slowly begins to fall into ruin — but they don’t care:

They had grown accustomed to disrepair.

Their lives become reduced to a 20km radius of the lichen-encrusted house and they have little interest in the outside world. They demonstrate an alarming lack of curiosity about anything. It takes them three whole years before they wonder about the mountain, the only thing that never changes, behind them.

The landlord was called to unblock the drain. He came armed with rods and rubber gloves. As he crouched on the gravel to rummage and bail, Sigh finally remembered to ask him about the mountain – whether or not it was commonage, and if there was a path all the way to the top. Yes and yes, he told them, though it was probably overgrown because nobody went up there. The mouth of the path was through the farmer’s yard behind the milking parlour and he himself had never climbed it, though for a long time he had been meaning to. […] They say there is a wild goat who lives up there, the landlord said, the last surviving member of an indigenous flock. They say that from the top, the landlord said, you can see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples.

By the time the seventh year swings around — measured in the passing of seasons, all forensically described in Baume’s careful but elegantly detailed prose — they’ve worked up enough wherewithal to climb it. And when they do, they see a whole new perspective on the world below and make a surprising observation about their own, closely entwined relationship.

Exquisite prose

Something about Seven Steeples didn’t entirely work for me. There’s no dialogue, no plot and the characters are aloof, perhaps because there’s no interior life and we don’t ever get to know what they’re thinking or feeling.

And while the prose is exquisite, particularly in the way Baume chronicles the weather, the passing seasons, the plant life and the animals that inhabit the countryside, there’s far too much exposition. I quickly grew bored of Bell and Sigh’s life, their passivity and their inability to follow through on the things they realised needed to be done or addressed.

However, as an exploration of hearth and home, Seven Steeples offers us a glimpse of an alternative lifestyle, one in which the busyness of the modern world is rejected and the rawness of the natural one is embraced.

For other takes on this novel, please see Claire’s review at Word by Word and Jacqui’s review at JacquiWine’s Journal.

The book has just been shortlisted for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers.

I have previously reviewed Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking, both of which I loved.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth23. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.