Late Learner by Ciara Geraghty (HarperCollins, £14.99)
“Learning to drive did as much good for my mental health as four years of therapy” – it’s this admission, made by a close friend, that springs to mind when I read the blurb of Geraghty’s latest novel. Ronda, a 44-year-oldd risk-averse daydreamer must learn to drive or face eviction from her hypochondriac mother’s home. Her driving instructor? Her sister, of course. She’s the perfect one who, at six years Ronda’s junior, has life mastered. Geraghty has laid out all the ingredients for a charming novel where hope and growth star at middle age. The execution, however, is lacklustre. Narrative implausibilities distract in a novel that is otherwise frustratingly predictable. Brigid O’Dea
The Living and the Dead, Tales of Loss and Rebirth from Irish Nature by Conor W O’Brien (Merrion Press, €18.99)
“ ... the path and its parallel ditch are fringed with muddy green heather, that plant almost as omnipresent as the sphagnum moss that spawned the bog”. The natural world and its luscious lexical landscape form a generous terrain for writers. However, conveying the immensity of this world to the page is no small challenge. O’Brien nails the brief. From the great auk, to the right whale and natterjack toad, the acclaimed Irish wildlife writer explores the species lost, nearly lost, and recovered in Ireland over the past 500 years. O’Brien’s knowledge is vast. The text is laced with some truly awesome facts. Most remarkable, however, is the author’s ability to transmute this knowledge with prose that befits the beauty of its subject. Brigid O’Dea
Fieldnotes from Celtic Palestine by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost (University of Wales Press, $88)
This is an uncategorisable work of creativity and activism. Part lyrical memoir, it recounts Mac Giolla Chríost’s experiences in Palestine and in Derry, where his Irish-speaking Protestant family resettled after being threatened out of Belfast in the 1970s. It is also a poetic analysis of the work of four other Celts – Brian Keenan, Dervla Murphy, Colum McCann and Osi Rhys Osmond – who approached Palestine through autobiography, travel writing, fiction and visual art. The book creates an intertextual conversation that shifts between theory and the sensory realities of cherries, sage tea, checkpoints and nightmares. Bearing witness to colonialism and conflict, it asks how identity shapes testimony. This is a complex and compelling book that underlines how art can illuminate the “moral heart of things”. Claire Mitchell
