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LIterature Reviews
‘Tender and tough, Audacious and Fluid’: The Wild Laughter
Generally speaking, the Irish novel is a shifting yet clearly distinct beast. It is often rich in prose, plastered with misery and dripping black comedy, creating a cocktail potent enough to have you laughing, recoiling and tearful by the…
Girl, Woman, Other: lending a voice to a new generation of black, British non-conformists
From the opening dedication of her eight novel, Girl, Woman, Other, Anglo-Nigerian best-selling author Bernardine Evaristo, makes her intention of telling marginalised stories by usually overlooked minority groups clear:
For the sisters…
Book Review | The Last of the Irin: Volume One is an Ambitious Take on Ancient Aliens
The belief that humankind was created and fostered through our early years by extra-terrestrials is not an uncommon one. Though mostly dismissed as a myth and conspiracy theory it's hard not to look at the Egyptian or Mayan pyramids or the…
Preparing for the end of the world: A Review of Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an…
COVID-19 has given us more of a taste of an apocalypse than we have ever had, emptying our streets, shops, and pushing family and friends away from one another and into their own bubbles. Mark O’Connell’s award-winning book, To Be a…
The Jagged Fragmentation of Abuse: A Review of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa
Vanessa Wye was fifteen when she first had sex with her English teacher, Jacob Strane. At thirty-two, some of Strane’s students come forward to accuse him of abuse, something that horrifies Vanessa. She doesn’t remember him abusing her.…
Tatty as a Child Narrator
Female child narrators are rare in Irish Literature, while the notable presence of the male childhood is enough to form a genre of its own. Thus when Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Tatty was published to great acclaim in 2004, it was breaking…
What’s Wrong with Eating People? Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
I once bought a book with the title, What’s Wrong with Eating People? It didn’t offer any notable enlightenment on its titular question, and was surprisingly dull, but it did plant the query stubbornly in my brain. It’s not that I’d…
The Colours of the Brontës’ Worlds: A Review of Isabel Greenberg’s Glass Town
We drift between series, movies, video games, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and 24/7 news. Colourful content fills our lives to the point that boredom is almost impossible. But, this was not the case on the moors of 19th…
The Book of Revelations by Daragh Fleming: A Review
I finished reading Joseph O’Neill’s Good Trouble last week and had said at the time that it was very unusual for me to be able to sit down and read a book of short stories from start to finish in the order that they were ordered.…
Barry’s Dark Night of The Soul | A Review of Night Boat to Tangier
“It is a tremendously Hibernian dilemma—a broken family, lost love, all the melancholy rest of it—and a Hibernian easement for it is suggested: fuck it, we’ll go for an old drink.” There is perhaps no better conspectus or cure for the…