Books in Brief: John MacKenna’s collection leaves its readers yearning for more

I Knew this Place
By John MacKenna
Harvest Press, €15
It is almost impossible to read any of the essays in John MacKenna's latest collection without hearing them in his own voice, issuing from the radio as it has done on so many Sunday mornings as part of RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany. MacKenna is a favourite of listeners for a reason; his eye for detail, his ability to capture the mundane and the extraordinary, and to show us the relationship between the two, are enchanting. These short stories and poems are no less than that – enchantments woven with rich and intimate language, snapshots of lives lived, and days passed, distinctly Irish and yet utterly universal. For a collection to hold more than 80 essays sounds like a monumental task for any reader. But if I Knew This Place was twice or even three times as long, the reader would still be left yearning for more, as this one was. – Becky Long

The Winter Dress
Angela Keogh
Harvest Press, €12
Rose, a wild Irish dressmaker, and Br John, a faithful yet agnostic monk, cross paths at the end of a winter's day in 1348, in an Ireland at war with itself and its fracturing cultural identities. Using sources rooted in folklore, history and linguistic nuance, Keogh writes the story of the Black Plague in Ireland. Keogh has a creative background, as both a theatre director and an actor, and the spectre of the stage casts a shadow over the narrative.

The emotional interiority of her central characters is at once authentic and intense but at times they find themselves placed opposite other figures as though they were figures on an empty stage. Keogh's language is rich and complex, and her two central narratives intertwine in unexpected and satisfying ways. A strange and unsettling read, not least because of the parallels the reader cannot help but draw between Rose and John's experiences and the current global pandemic, The Winter Dress lingers and resonates long after the last page. – Becky Long

The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot
By Marianne Cronin
Doubleday
Marianne Cronin spent six years writing her debut novel. The result? A tender, dewy eyed tale that presents the unlikely friendship between 17-year-old Lenni and 83-year-old Margot as they travel full-heartedly towards the end of their lives (on this earth), together. Lenni, a tenacious, audacious teenager befriends soft-hearted Margot in the hospital's art room, and together they decide to paint the combined hundred years of their lives. This book is less about death, than living. Lenni, whose prognosis is "terminal", teems with life. Not only does she infuse the lives of those she meets – Fr Arthur, New Nurse, The Temp – with joy, but the skinny girl with the shock of Nordic blonde hair also challenges those around her. Cronin's characters are fulsomely drawn, and chime together to tell a sweet story about connection, loss and living. – Brigid O'Dea

A host of books to watch out for in 2021 – all from independent publishers

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Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: hostile, compelling Patricia Highsmith biography

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Two must-read books on love and honour in the time of Covid

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How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
By Elif Shafak
Profile, £4.99
A successful novelist, Elif Shafak has an academic background in political theory and here combines both proficiencies to analyse contemporary social anxieties. Not only authority, power and wealth, but also data and knowledge are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, and greater numbers feel excluded, leading to distrust in even the most basic institutions, she believes. If you feel you're not being listened to, you're less likely to listen to others. People who feel this way shouldn't look inwards but outwards – to others suffering similarly, to listen to and learn from them. Her recipe for staying sane is threefold: channel justified anger into constructive action, embrace complexity over simplicity, open up to multiple identities and "belongings". Thought-provoking but with some questionable arguments and oversimplification in places. – Brian Maye

Shakespearean
By Robert McCrum
Picador, £14.99
Shakespeare's work has endured and is as much a part of our time as of his own, and Robert McCrum here seeks to discover why. "It's in the minutiae of the particular – the quotidian and the personal – that he excels" is part of the answer, as is "a ubiquitous mirror for the anxieties of the moment". Mainly the latter it seems: "The Shakespeare who came of age during decades of crisis, dread and disorder speaks to every generation that finds itself in extremis." Combining a loose biographical framework with an autobiographical thread, McCrum covers a lot of ground: setting Shakespeare in his time, examining the plays' afterlives, looking at historical moments with which the works particularly resonated, and exploring Shakespeare's use of language. It's a striking achievement. – Brian Maye

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s
By Simon Hall
Faber, £16.99
In September 1960, Fidel Castro attended for the first time a gathering of the UN General Assembly in New York. Leaving his midtown hotel over a row about money, he moved to Harlem where he was received rapturously by the local African-American community and held court with such well-known figures as Malcom X, president Nasser of Egypt, Khrushchev and Allen Ginsberg. Decolonisation was gathering pace, the civil rights and black power movements were stirring, as was a radical student counterculture. For all of these, Castro had a powerful, iconic appeal. His brief American stay "proved to be both a turning point in the history of the Cold War and a foundational moment in the creation of what we think of as 'the 1960s'," argues Simon Hall in this perceptive, thoroughly researched and readable study. – Brian Maye

Lairies
By Steve Hollyman
Influx, £9.99
Hollyman's debut is "mapping the lives of violent young men... living aimlessly but desperately hunting for purpose". A worthy idea, but one that doesn't carry over. Hollyman writes assuredly in the vernacular of his characters, but this allows too many clichés, and flat sentences like: "a litany of alcohol swirls in your stomach". At times it feels forced, like Irvine Welsh strained through Fight Club by Charles Bronson. Or contrived: among all the drink, cigs, fights, and effin' and blindin', one Begby-type uses "proclivity" while ranting; a geezah says "How very Kantian of you" expounding on his love of a dust-up and dialectic; someone wrecks the telly because "Trisha" provokes him; really? Angry young men are on display here, but with little sense of what's behind it all. – NJ McGarrigle