City of Bohane Kevin Barry Vintage, £7.99ohane is a postapocalyptic, low-tech, dog-eat-dog Irish city – and it's mesmerising. This clan-ruled pressure cooker totters between the grim western ocean that hosts sporadic European trade routes and the terrifying expanse of waste called the Big Nothin' – Mad Max meets Elmore Leonard's Westerns via the Bog of Allen.
Under their dapper leader, Logan Hartnett, the Hartnett Fancy clan are plunged into a feud with the families of the Northside Rises – parties are formally notified by letter – by the viciousness of 90-year-old Girly Hartnett, circumventing her son’s power over half the city’s population with the click of her fingers. Logan’s grip on the traces is dangerously vulnerable to his romantic notions. The characters’ coarse language is vividly poetic, and there’s a peculiar optimism about their lives that comes of living in an atmosphere of heart-stopping brutishness. A unique and fascinating book.
Claire Looby
Long Time, No See
Dermot Healy
Faber and Faber, £8.99
The title is typically mischievous: we haven’t had a new prose work from Dermot Healy since 2000. Admirers of his novels Sudden Times and A Goat’s Song, as well as the memoir The Bend for Home, awaited this volume with baited breath – and then, mostly, didn’t know what to make of it. It’s a puzzle, for sure. Some 400 pages with no plot to speak of; characters who blur in and out of focus (and each other); page upon page of terse, almost gnomic dialogue – in short, Patrick McCabe meets James Ellroy, except more playful. Healy, in fact, has captured Ireland talking for Ireland. Here are three generations: the colourful oldies, Joejoe and the Blackbird; the innocent young, including narrator Mister Psyche, his girlfriend, Anna, and a host of satellites, many of them immigrants; and the put-upon parents, a nurse and a JCB operator, the only Irish people who do any work. The more they all talk – and boy, do they talk – the less they say. Nevertheless, Ireland seeps out of the small silences. If you listen, you’ll find a lot to love.
Arminta Wallace
The Song of Achilles
By Madeline Miller
Bloomsbury, £7.99
“Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles,” begins Homer’s Iliad. The Greek hero’s anger powers the action in the epic, and writers through the centuries have studied its cause and effect. The latest is Madeline Miller. In a prequel to the poem, told from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’s beloved companion, scenes from their boyhood unfold, as friendship becomes erotic love. While the language can be overripe – “his skin was the colour of just-pressed olive oil” – this is an impressively fresh reimagining, convincingly rendered, at least until Miller’s narrative overlaps with Homer’s at Troy. Here the savager aspects of the poem, especially the treatment of women in war, are softened. Yet while attempts to make Achilles more palatable in the 21st century seem clumsy, Miller’s book, like those of Mary Renault in the past, will bring the world of the Homeric poems alive for new readers.
Helen Meany
Christy Brown: The Life That Inspired My Left Foot
Georgina Louise Hambleton
Mainstream Publishing, £7.99
“We need confidence and friendliness as well as, if not more than, medical treatment to avoid the development of a set of very crooked and twisted attitudes.” So says the writer, painter and paraplegic Christy Brown in his autobiography, My Left Foot, and this reprint of Georgina Louise Hambleton’s biography captures the contradictions inherent in his remarkable life. When Brown was born, in Dublin in 1932, his mother was advised to put him in a home; her refusal to abandon him laid the foundations for his later success. Now best known from the Oscar-winning film of his autobiography, his second novel was hailed by this newspaper as “a book that will surely stand beside Joyce”. Hambleton gives a sensitive portrayal of a talented artist who struggled with depression and alcoholism and who, she claims, was abused by a controlling, neglectful wife. This is a fascinating account of a unique man who overcame his physical limitations to become much more than his famous left foot.
Freya McClements
Voltaire: A Life
Ian Davidson
Profile Books, £12.99
The journalist Ian Davidson’s interest in Voltaire was first piqued when he was asked to read the imperishable satirical novella Candide for his book club. Before long he found himself working through the man’s collected correspondence, of 15,284 letters. Then came the nearly 6,000 written to or about Voltaire. It is the signal strength of the biography that grew out of this epistolary labour of love that Davidson has kept his sights firmly on the man behind the letters rather than the “man of letters” so fetishised by generations of scholars. The portrait that emerges is as complex as it is surprising. Far from setting out to become the chief antagonist of the ancien régime, Voltaire spent his first 65 years promoting himself as a poet and playwright. It was only later that the public association of his name with the Enlightenment values of tolerance and free speech took hold. And no, he was not an atheist.
Daragh Downes
