I am what you might call an “armchair explorer.” I love reading about new places and parts of the world. I am fascinated by the history of communities. Places are not just locations; they are ideas formed by the stories that people tell about them. I love novels where I can get a true sense of a place and time. This passion led me to a love for folklore and legend. Nothing can provide a sense of a place better than its folklore. When I wrote Intercession, one of my main goals was to create a place and people that could be known through the stories they tell each other.
Set in a small, coastal Oregon town, this lyrical novel follows an intimate cast of characters as the history and lore of their town intertwines with their lives. Each character has their own struggles and joys and their own story to tell.
The cast includes two aging best friends at the Public Works Department, a twelve-year-old boy who rides bikes and reads Irish history, a doctor who talks little but smokes often, and a philosophizing crow who hangs out with a mechanic. Doyle expresses such love and empathy for his characters.
To Doyle, everything matters: each character, each story, every tree, every choice. It’s the most beautiful novel I’ve ever read.
Like Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.
In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a…
The Bear and the Nightingale expertly intertwines folklore into the real world.
Set at the edge of medieval Russia, Arden infuses the novel with fairy tales and folklore told by the hearth. After her mother dies, Vasilisa’s father returns with a new wife from the city. She quickly forbids Vasilisa and her grandmother from honoring the old spirits or sharing legends of the forest. But as omens start to befall the town, Vasilisa realizes the old stories are more than just fables; they hold truth.
Arden uses history, lore, and cold winter nights to create such a strong sense of place. I frequently thought of this novel as I weaved Irish folklore into my own. Arden has made her world so dense and alive by filling it with centuries of history and allowing the reader to decide what is real and worth believing.
_____________________________ Beware the evil in the woods...
In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, an elderly servant tells stories of sorcery, folklore and the Winter King to the children of the family, tales of old magic frowned upon by the church.
But for the young, wild Vasya these are far more than just stories. She alone can see the house spirits that guard her home, and sense the growing forces of dark magic in the woods. . .
Exit West follows a young couple who must escape their war-torn Middle Eastern city and find refuge somewhere on this shrinking planet.
The couple loses their sense of home while their home loses its history. Hamid writes with a detached intimacy, like from the viewpoint of a drone, the kind that bombed Nadia and Sayed's city, as it hovers over the couple during their most challenging and intimate moments.
Still, while they leave everything they know, Nadia and Sayed find home in each other. Hamid crafts a sense of place not bound to one location, but to two hearts. As the couple tries to locate doors that open to refuge sites around the world, we never truly leave the destruction of their home city.
Beautiful in its simplicity, Exit West is a powerful novel by my current favorite author.
Perhaps no other novel falls as perfectly into both the categories of historical fiction and fairy tale.
Set in 1920s Alaska, The Snow Child follows Jack and Mabel as their relationship slowly dissolves, in part because of their inability to have children. They soon notice a young girl hunting with a fox near their home. She appears to somehow survive the Alaskan winter on her own. They slowly begin to consider tales of the region and discover who the girl may be.
Ivey depicts the struggles of homesteading in Alaska as well as the despair of being barren. From the beginning, I felt for the characters emotionally while I became absorbed in the mystery and lore of the wild girl in the wilderness.
A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, Eowyn Ivey's THE SNOW CHILD was a top ten bestseller in hardback and paperback, and went on to be a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in…
Gentle, soft, and full of humor, This is Happiness is told through the narration of a 78-year-old seminarian dropout in Ireland circa 1920.
The story is an oral history of a fictional town as modern ideas of electricity begin to arrive. Niall Williams writes with some of the most gorgeous prose I’ve ever read about Ireland's weather and landscape. He takes time to linger on small, intimate moments of his characters from teenage embarrassments to first loves to visiting your grandparents.
Williams creates a fictional town that is so real and hopeful despite being so "behind the times." Williams argues that every life has a story and our greatest joys are those framed in sorrow. This book was such an inspiration for my first novel that I named a character Niall after the author of this lovely novel.
Every time I am reminded of This is Happiness, a smile comes to my face.
Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards
Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it…
Aoife is cursed. Everyone says so, except for her father who knows such things are nonsense. Born under mysterious circumstances after the Irish Civil War, Aoife is willing to do whatever it takes to rid herself of the malediction. She encounters saints and witches while she navigates the superstitions and folklore that permeate her homeland and guide her toward adulthood.
Full of Irish and Catholic folklore, Intercession weaves through the history and myths of Ireland to its thrilling and mysterious conclusion. In a place steeped in legend, Aoife must decide for herself what stories are worth believing and suffer the consequences of those beliefs, for better or worse.
The Valor of Valhalla series by Martin Kearns is a pulse-pounding dark urban fantasy trilogy that fuses the raw power of Norse mythology with the grit of modern warfare. Set in a world where ancient gods and mythical creatures clash with secret military organizations and rogue heroes, the series follows a band of unseeming heroes who are bound to an ancient prophecy. As they navigate a dangerous web of deceit, sacrifice, and violent combat, they must confront not only their own demons but also the growing threat of Ragnarök—the Norse apocalypse.
At its heart, The Valor of Valhalla blends high-stakes…
In a battle between two ancient evils, can one naïve young man become the last hope against powerful creatures of legend?
David Dolan thinks he's already got the world figured out. But when a collapsed bridge plunges him into the icy Hudson, he's pulled deep into the deadly realm that exists between life and death. And with his earthly form trapped in a coma, he's vulnerable to the horde of demons hell-bent on his utter destruction.
Traversing the road to the afterlife, David seeks the wisdom and skills he needs to fight the demonic forces reigning havoc on his allies…
