The Story Collector by Evie Woods (One More Chapter, £9.99)
Evie Woods follows her bestseller The Lost Bookshop with this sweet tale about the healing power of kindness. Following the break-up of her marriage, Sarah Harper finds herself on a plane from New York to Shannon – not Boston, as planned. In a small Co Clare village, Sarah discovers safety and humour among the residents and decides to stay and recover from her recent trauma, or “Big Bad”, as she calls it. A tale within the tale revolves around a story collector who, a century previously, sought out local legends of the “Good People”, the fairies who look upon the village as their own, lending their magic to those who need it. Happily, the combination of secrets revealed and gentle magic renews Sarah’s passion for life. CLAIRE LOOBY
Colette by Michèle Roberts (Oxford University Press, £18.99)
This is no ordinary academic introduction or companion to Colette. Michèle Roberts’s tribute to her “literary mother” is a deeply personal record of how a body of work can be read and reread over the years so that it is absorbed into a life. Roberts selects four key texts and roots her analysis in autobiography. For instance, she examines how her own relationship to her mother’s Catholicism shaped her response to Colette’s amoral sensuality, and how her involvement in the feminist culture of the 1970s and 80s influenced her reappraisal of the iconic French writer. This experience-based approach allows Roberts to bypass much of the traditional critical discourse and home in on material that feels fresh. Her close readings are insightful, offering particularly sharp analyses of form and narrative gaps. This intimate critical portrait convincingly argues that Colette’s work is far darker and more complex than it is often credited to be. RUBY EASTWOOD
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Wild-Looking but Fine by Ciara O’Dowd (UCD Press, €29.50)
The difficulty of recovering a vanished history is at the heart of Ciara O’Dowd’s Wild-Looking but Fine, a joint biography of Aideen O’Connor and Ria Mooney, two Abbey Theatre actresses of the 1930s. Despite the recognition they received in their day for the understanding and artistry they brought to their craft, their legacies have been all but forgotten today. O’Dowd’s book seeks to reinstate their importance. Her writing is delicate and meticulously researched, picking up on archival traces to create compelling portraits of these two women. Despite their different personalities and visions, the careers of both actresses were pushed down similar trajectories by the aesthetic conventions of 1930s Irish theatre making and the conservative values of the society at large. The strength of this book is its nuanced understanding of how a life is shaped and bound by the idiosyncrasies of its time. RUBY EASTWOOD
Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief & Bereavement Across Cultures by Naomi Westerman (404 Ink, £7.50)
Westerman injects life into the subject of death. Following years of academic research, the author explores the “Venn diagram of art/feminism/bodies/death”. Unlike much writing that reflects on the morose topic of death, Westerman approaches the subject with verve. In a tight 96 pages of quippy prose, she examines subjects ranging from “death saunas” to “grief raves”, male artists’ obsession with the passivity of female corpses, the ethics of true crime and the lure of horror movies, capitalism as a rejection of death and the importance of price transparency in funeral shopping. This is not, however, humour at the expense of meaning. Westerman explores the rituals and taboos surrounding death and grieving insightfully, concluding with a hypothesis that may well be one of the most comforting theories of death, I have ever read. BRIGID O’DEA
Following Sunshine by Niamh McAnally (Black Rose Writing, £16.95)
The allure of adventure at sea, combined with a commitment to volunteering in different jobs, forms the core of Niamh McAnally’s candid memoir. Her travels have taken her to remote places such as Belize, Fiji and Tonga, and in Vanuatu she worked on a turtle conservation project. As the youngest daughter of actors Ray McNally and Ronnie Masterson, she did not want to trade on the fame of her parents’ names, but craved variety and was determined to take risks carving a life of her own. This involved sampling fresh cultures and learning new customs, giving her a sense of “living a global life”. Themes of her adventurous career cover loss, humour and romance where she unexpectedly finds love as a solo sailor in the Bahamas. PAUL CLEMENTS
The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk (Weatherglass Books, £12.99)
Anne Hawk’s promising debut novel deals with the impact on those left behind by those who travelled as part of the Windrush Generation – people in the Caribbean who were invited by the UK government to travel to help build post-second World War Britain – specifically a young girl, Wheeler, and her extended and quarrelsome family. There are deep reasons for this family fractiousness of course, which Hawk draws out patiently through a child’s wide-eyed wonder growing up in a world without her mother; life lurches from trying to find a place of love and attachment, to fearful unknowingness with a moment’s shift in mood. Hawk ably captures the strong sensations of Caribbean life and the rhythms and subconscious rumblings of a family that’s fractured by secrets. NJ MCGARRIGLE
