Fiction – paperback; Magabala Books; 96 pages; 2023. I am partial to a verse novel (although I have only read a handful), so I was keen to read Ali Cobby Eckermann’s She is the Earth, which was longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize. The book is a luminous love letter to Mother Nature, including her life-sustaining ecosystems, weather patterns and landscapes. In many ways, it reminded me of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, but instead of looking at Earth from above, it looks at Earth from the ground up and presents it as a living, breathing organism. I am staring at the new day it grows bri ..read more

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010 which has been on hiatus for several years — but has now returned for 2024. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part simply visit this post and fill in the form! Today’s guest is Davida Chazan, who blogs at The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog Davida describes herse ..read more

Congratulations to Northern Irish writer Deirdre Madden who has been awarded a prestigious Windham-Campbell prize, worth US$175,000! Eight of these awards have been handed out every year since 2013. (Australia’s own Helen Garner received one in 2016, famously thinking it was a spam email and almost binning the news of her win.) Madden is one of my favourite writers. In the words of the Windham-Campbell prize committee, she brings to “life the smallest movements of characters’ impulses and thoughts, portraying the intricacies of human lives with compassion and effortless depth ..read more

The best of life is lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything… Sitting on the memorial bench in Ballinamore in March 2011 Today marks the 18th anniversary of Irish writer John McGahern’s death. Long-time followers of this blog, particularly when it was hosted on Typepad, will know that McGahern is my favourite writer. McGahern was born in County Leitrim in 1934, the eldest child of seven. He was raised on a farm run by his mother, a part-time primary school teacher, while his father, a garda se ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Europa Editions; 300 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson. Children’s right to privacy in the Internet age is at the heart of Kids Run the Show, a provocative novel — part crime thriller, part social commentary — by French writer Delphine de Vigan. The story focuses on Mélanie Claux, a young mother of two, who exploits her children online for financial gain. It is set against a backdrop of calls to regulate the commercial exploitation of children by their parents and to classify the activity as work. In fact, in 2021, France introduced a law to prote ..read more

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010 which has been on hiatus for several years — but now it’s time to bring it back. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part simply visit this post and fill in the form! Today’s guest is Bill, who blogs at The Australian Legend. Bill, who is based in Perth, Western Aust ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Picador; 436 pages; 2021. Colm Tóibín is one of my favourite writers, but The Magician didn’t quite work for me. It’s an account of the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning German author Thomas Mann (1875-1955), whose work — Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain et al — I’ve never read, so part of me wonders whether I might have enjoyed the experience more if I was familiar with his writing. Yet, on the face of it, Mann is the perfect subject for a fictionalised biography because his life was so intriguing on so many levels — economically, socially, political ..read more

Two longlists for big prizes for women’s writing have been announced this week: the Stella Prize (in Australia) and the Women’s Prize for Fiction (in the UK). The 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist The Women’s Prize for Fiction was established in 1996 to highlight and remedy the imbalance in coverage, respect and reverence given to women writers versus their male peers. It is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000. Hangman by Maya Binyam (One) In Defence of the Act by Effie Black (épo ..read more

Fiction – hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 225 pages; 2021. Can there be a more intimate act than listening to a war criminal’s testimony and then interpreting it — in real-time — in an international courtroom setting? Such interpreters often deal with sensitive subjects — including violence, death and ethnic cleansing — but must maintain impartiality and communicate what they hear accurately and without emotion. Or, as the first-person narrator in Katie Kitamura’s extraordinary novel Intimacies says, they must make the “spaces between languages as small as possible”. […] interpretation can be prof ..read more

A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024 Fiction – Kindle edition; The Gallery Press; 224 pages; 2018. Nightspawn is John Banville’s debut novel, first published in 1971. It’s a slippery story, impossible to get a handle on. It’s full of political, often murderously violent, intrigue, peopled with a cast of strange characters and, despite its Greek island setting, pulses with a darkly Gothic atmosphere. From an alleyway came the flash of a fang and one red eye, there, gone. (Location 264) It’s narrated by an expatriate Irish writer called Benjamin White who’s entangled in a devio ..read more