“These motocross bikes are going up and down the streets outside their houses because normally they'd have somewhere to go, now they've nowhere to go.”
For some, life is an inherited ache to leave Vietnam and half-remembered stories and unprocessed feelings embodied in what their grandparents said, or didn’t say, about the past.
This imaginative noir comedy novel follows a misanthropic PI around Ireland – and is built on in-jokes, literary allusions, and puns on Irish language place names and orthography, writes our reviewer.
Beautifully written, this book lulls you along like a river on a calm day. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its moments of drama though, writes Daniel Seery.
“It’s always the people you miss the most, about anything,” Liz Meldon says on a recent return to the place she built a community around, which is gone now.
For more than a decade, Brian Showers has compiled and anthologised Irish Gothic and horror writers. Few, though, have been such a mystery to him as the strangely named George Edmund Lobo.
The stories told by working-class women in inner-city Dublin that are included in Kevin C. Kearns’ book have acquired a new resonance in contemporary Ireland.
In his memoir, Seamus Kelly – founder of the Ballymun Concrete News – sets about convincing journalists and publishers of the need for positive news. It’s a hard sell, right now.
I often scribble notes as I read, little breadcrumbs I hope will lead back to the heart of the book after I’ve finished. The reminder that stands out for me with this novel is “unpredictable”, writes Daniel Seery.
