In July, Hubby and I spent a week in the city of Cork, Ireland’s second-city (though with a population of only 300,000 it feels more like a large town). I love exploring new places. Aside from the joy to be had from the main sights, there’s the thrill of simply wandering around a strange city, … More Fools of Fortune by William Trevor
Wind the clock back twenty years or so, and you’d find me trying to bash out a novel. It was a dystopian number called Embryo Song that owed more than a little to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I managed 50,000 words (about 200 pages) before I ran out of ideas and energy and now, … More Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
I was introduced to the concept of fasting at an early age. My mum and older sister would fast (or ‘abstain’ from food) for the hour before we went to mass on Sunday. In church we’d sing hymns with lines like “help me to mortify my flesh”. Lent was book-ended by fasting on Ash Wednesday … More The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
From age two up to my early teens we lived round the corner from Mr and Mrs J and their three lads, a family who were notorious in the area. Mrs J did not dress like the other mums, whose style choices tended towards vaguely shapeless dresses, comfy shoes and headscarves – this was the … More Milkman by Anna Burns
One summer holiday, as a ‘project’, I decided to research my family. Not my family tree, you understand, but my family. I was ten, I think; eleven at most. I devised a list of fifteen questions and then interviewed all my immediate family members, parents, brother, sister, cousin, aunts, uncle, granddad. (As children go I … More Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
My father hated DIY whatever its shape and size. He had an old, brown canvas bag of tools that lived on the floor of the shed and only he was allowed to open. It hardly ever saw the light of day. Occasionally, though, there’d be something needing doing that mum didn’t want to tackle, putting … More The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney
‘I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.’ So writes Roseanne McNulty, a centenarian patient in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, as she secretly puts pen to … More The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
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