I love great writing and great storytelling too. As a child I liked nothing more than when my father made up bedtime stories for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how writers work exceptionally hard not just at getting the plot of a story right but in the words they chose. Being Irish, I love to support the wealth of enviably good writers that seem to spill out from these shores. In each of these books you will find love and loss and laughter. It never fails to make me smile when abroad to see one of these guys on the shelves of the bookshops I visit.
I wrote...
Listening Still
By
Anne Griffin
What is my book about?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to chat with the dead about what they wished they could have done while alive? Meet Jeanie Masterson, a funeral director in a small Irish town, who can do just that. Jeanie has possessed this gift, which at times proves more burden than bonus, since the day she was born. Now aged thirty-two, Jeanie listens to those clients asking for her help, while struggling with how her own life has ended up tied to the family business and her comfortable marriage, and wonders, is it too late to run.
Praised as “a warm and funny read, full of lovely characters and poignant moments,” (Good Housekeeping) Listening Still promises to keep you engrossed from beginning to end.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Milkman
By
Anna Burns
Why this book?
Anna Burns won the booker for this novel and rightly so. Burn plays with the norms of novel writing both in the unique voice she uses and in not giving any of her characters' names. It takes a page or two to get there but when you do it is a treat. We meet Middle Sister who is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her Maybe-Boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. Set in Belfast, this is a fabulous book, exploring teenage inhibition in the backdrop of troubles. It is funny and sad and captures the quirks and cruelties of growing up in a divided community.
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Nothing But Blue Sky
By
Kathleen MacMahon
Why this book?
David has lost his wife far too early. A man in mourning, he relives their twenty years together and sees that the ground beneath them had shifted and he had simply not noticed, or was it more that he had chosen not to. The writing here is spectacular and the theme of love and loss so very moving. Set between Ireland and Spain, McMahon captures the sublime and mundane nature of long-term love with exceptional skill. Another reason I like this book is that in my debut novel, my main character Maurice Hannigan, while very different from David, was also a widower, and naturally, the issue of loss figured heavily so I feel a bond to this book that is very special.
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Strange Flowers
By
Donal Ryan
Why this book?
I love Donal Ryan’s work and thankfully he is a prolific writer. Really, I could have chosen any of his books, but this one is his most recent and had me rereading sentence after sentence because his prose is so full of beauty. Paddy and Kit Gladney’s daughter disappears in 1973. They know nothing of where she has gone and if she is alive at all. Five years later she returns, with a son, changing the course of her family’s life forever. This a beautiful and devastating exploration of loss, alienation, and the redemptive power of love and affirms Ryan as one of the best storytellers Ireland has ever known.
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Life Sentences
By
Billy O'Callaghan
Why this book?
Set over three generations of the one family, this is the story of their fight for survival. What I love here is not just the prose, because there is no one finer than O’Callaghan, but also because it touches on the depopulation of Ireland’s small islands during the famine and the small island to which he refers has a very significant family connection for me. Partly based on O’Callaghan’s own family, Life Sentences tells an epic story of working-class life in Ireland from famine right through to modern-day. It is an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, and reconciliation.
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The Pull of the Stars
By
Emma Donoghue
Why this book?
Dublin 1918, Nurse Julia Power works in an understaffed maternity hospital in the city centre at the time of the Spanish Flu. In the dark intensity of this ward, Julia battles the pandemic trying to save the lives of those women and babies under her care alongside a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. There is inevitable loss, with the worlds of those left behind irrevocably changed. In this tender book that features a cameo appearance of one of Ireland’s greatest heroes, Doctor Kathleen Lynn, Donoghue produces a story that is both tragic and uplifting in a period of social and political upheaval during Ireland’s struggle for freedom.
