'Youth' by Kevin Curran
Kevin Curran’s new novel Youth captures four teenagers in contemporary Balbriggan, on the cusp of adulthood.
Read MoreKevin Curran’s new novel Youth captures four teenagers in contemporary Balbriggan, on the cusp of adulthood.
Read MoreBilly O’Callaghan’s new novel The Paper Man is a beautifully-crafted story of the now-forgotten Austrian footballing genius Matthias Sindelar and his young lover Rebekah, connecting Vienna in the 1930s and Cork City in the 30s and 80s.
Read MoreA discussion about Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady.
Read MoreAn annual round-up of short recommendations of books which I didn’t review fully.
Read MoreBernardine Evaristo’s autobiographical account traces her personal, sexual and creative journeys on the way to her recent artistic success and her ‘established and unswayable’ character.
Read MoreAshley Hickson-Lovence’s novel Your Show, an imagining of the career of the only black Premier League referee, Uriah Rennie, is a zippy and enjoyable read.
Read MoreIn his late 70s, Bernard MacLaverty has given us a marvellous collection of short stories of the highest quality, in the ironically-titled Blank Pages.
Read MoreToni Morrison only published one short story, ‘Recitatif’. It is now published for the first time in book form, with a brilliant introductory essay by Zadie Smith.
Read MoreThe most recent novel by the 2021 Nobel Laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives (2020), entirely justifies the Nobel Committee’s choice.
Read MoreClaire Keegan’s marvellous Small Things Like Us is a deeply moving portrait of a man’s life in mid-1980s Ireland, a superb follow-up to her masterpiece of a long short story, Foster.
Read MoreChimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story ‘Zikora’, published by Amazon Kindle in October 2020, is a pleasure.
Read MoreSara Baume has now written three lovely books, each characterised by carefulness, tenderness and a calm attention to the natural world. The latest is handiwork from Tramp Press, another book full of quiet pleasures.
Read MoreKatherine Mansfield’s brilliant short story ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is distinguished by a lightness of touch, as she lets us into the minds of two sisters whose hectoring father has just died.
Read MoreJ.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980) is a perfectly-achieved novel. In its 85 pages it contains multitudes.
Read MoreLucia Berlin’s title story for her collection A Manual for Cleaning Women is funny, painful, sharp, observant: just marvellous.
Read MoreMusa Okwonga’s In The End, It Was All About Love is a small book with many pleasures.
Read MoreAn exercise for English class suggested by George Saunders in his marvellous book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: divide Hemingway’s story ‘Cat in the Rain’ into 6 equal parts, handing them out one at a time, and examining the ‘escalations’ of the story.
Read MoreSimple Passion by Annie Ernaux was first published in France in 1991, but now arrives in English from Fitzcarraldo Editions in an immaculate translation by Tanya Leslie, perhaps to coincide with a film version.
It can be read it in 30 minutes (note: opens with 'strong material'). It's intense and honest, as always with Ernaux. So this post is extremely short, too.
Here are my thoughts on the longer, brilliant, more complex The Years.
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel, Open Water, is a lyrical story set in contemporary London, charting the tentative journey towards love of two young people. It is a novel about intimacy, dancing, music, and racism.
Read MoreClaire Keegan’s novella Foster is one of the outstanding pieces of writing by an Irish author in recent years (and a fine option for class study). Some years ago she came to my school, read from the work, and was asked questions by the pupils.
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