I am running late in posting this review which should have gone live about a day ago - so let me start by apologising to my fellow book club bloggers* (especially sorry Lily!)who've been checking in on Sunday May 2nd. My excuses might sound trite but they are merely that we have thirteen members of hubby's family visiting from Holland for the week as he reaches a significant birthday which we will celebrate on Thursday with a party in a local establishment of repute. There may even be a post about it if we come through it with our dignity intact!I am enjoying being on holidays from work for the next week, and hosting our guests with all the hospitality we can muster. They are staying in a nearby town in holiday bungalows. We had a great barbecue yesterday with hubby cooking for 22 people... Similar posts

I had bought this book a few months ago, though it was yet unread. Something obviously attracted me to the book, to make me buy it. ‘Brooklyn’ won the Costa Fiction Award in January. In March, the Mayor of Chicago announced it as their book choice for the ‘One Book, One Chicago’ citywide reading programme. The Irish Times launched their online book club with this book. Onto my review. I did not like this book. Sorry Marie as I know it was your suggestion. ‘Twas C.T.’s fault, not yours The back cover states the book is a tender story of departure and return, of great love and loss, and of the terrible choice between personal freedom and duty. In the character of Eilis Lacey Colm Tóibín has created a remarkable heroine, and in Brooklyn a novel of... Similar posts

It was a grand year for writing--my own favorite read of the year, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award for Fiction, and a number of other noted tomes still balance precariously on my bedside table, awaiting their chance. Here's a brief list of books by Irish or Irish-American writers who caught judges' attention in 2009 to earn shining notice:Novels and Short Story CollectionsColum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a nuanced, interwoven tale, well-balanced, won the U.S. National Book Award.Joseph O'Neill's novel about cricket as therapy, Netherland, won the PEN/Faulker award and the attention of the new American president; it also won top prize at the Listowel Writers Week Festival.Kevin Power's novel Bad Day in Blackrock won the Rooney Prize.William... Similar posts

It's been a year since the writer Nuala O'Faolain took her last breath. It wasn't an easy end. "Honest," some said, of the laments O'Faolain made on Marian Finucane's show and in other interviews made after her fatal cancer was diagnosed. "So sad," said others. "Why can't she just accept it?" She did not curl up in a corner, next to the hearth. She did not confess to being at peace. She raged against the dying of the light. Difficult, that's what I'd say she was. Always difficult. And yet we all need a bit of that kind of difficulty, which forces us to confront our assumptions. O'Faolain was the child in all of us, unfiltered. Wanting love. I read her book Are You Somebody? on Aerlingus crossing the Atlantic, and it shook me; it wasn't your typical soft Irish memoir. It was a demand for... Similar posts