LIterature Reviews

It’s been a month since I finished reading John Boyne’s latest novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and I haven’t quite gotten over it yet. A radical statement, about a novel?  Perhaps, but Boyne’s story and characters have remained with…

Smokey jazz music welcomes you to 1968 Manhattan so vividly that you reach for a phantom cigarette to follow a non-existent sip of a martini. To intensify your desire for a drink, there’s a fully stocked bar adjacent to the front door of a…

In late 2017, Cork-based New Binary Press issued an open call for submissions to a new anthology in aid of the fight – both at home and abroad – for women’s reproductive rights. Autonomy, to be edited by poet, workshop facilitator and…

“Everyone was so damn lonely. Everyone, no matter how hard they tried to ignore it,” says the narrator of “Out-of-town Harry”, by way of introduction to the world. With an opening sentence like that, one could expect Armel Dagorn’s debut…

British author Sarah Pinborough has published more than twenty novels – ranging from YA fantasy to TV tie-ins to horror – but her ‘breakout’ books (a borderline-depressing publishing term that refers to when a ‘mid-list’ writer makes it…

One word I’m not hearing or seeing an awful lot of in the lead-up to the Referendum on the Eighth Amendment is “power”, yet it’s precisely what is at stake for Ireland’s women. I’m a big believer in the value that literature can add to…

I hadn’t heard of Rosie Wilby before her book Is Monogamy Dead? landed on my desk. That sounds so quaint. Let’s be honest, the book was sent to me via email and I forwarded it to my Kindle so that I could read it at my leisure. Welcome to…

Irish women have many stories to tell, about ourselves, our mothers, our grandmothers. We stayed silent for a long time. An involuntary, imposed, shame driven silence. But that silence has been  broken, we are finding our voices, we are…

The Executor is Blake Morrison’s fourth novel, and his first since 2010’s excellent Othello-inspired The Last Weekend. Like that previous novel, The Executor has a first-person narrator, 40-something Matt Holmes, telling us his version…

I am fascinated by student-teacher relationships in fiction the way some people are by murder. I would never, but. But what’s that dysfunctional bit of someone that makes them think this action is in any way good, or logical, or acceptable,…