Add Ann Patchett, Sara Baume, Niamh Campbell, Sheila Armstrong, Claire Daverley, Bobby Palmer, Alan Bradley and more to your reading list
focuses on a woman reconnecting with her estranged former stepfather. For Daphne, “the past is a sinkhole”, and this story of family, love and memory is a warm bath of beautiful writing.
It’s an elegy to kindness: as one character says, “I swear to you, it’s mostly good people out there, with a few bad people around the edges”. is a quirky, darkly comic tale that will appeal far beyond dads, tennis players and tennis-playing dads.
After Ned loses his job, he’s meant to look after his young son instead, but when he finds an old tennis racket in the garage he becomes increasingly obsessed with the game, and captaining his team to victory. Tennis clubs are often microcosms of human misbehaviour, and this is delightfully brought to life here, and will remind you of every over-competitive midlife male. is full of foreboding, reflected by the unnerving cover image.
Haunting and intensely readable, it asks if we can ever really protect our children – and what if we can’t? I loved Campbell’s award-winning, is a poetic meditation on discoveries unearthed from the Irish bogland. There’s minimal dialogue; instead it delves deep into the land and excavates the past held there, via beautiful writing.
An elegant companion piece toby poet and author Helen Dwyer tells the story of a schoolgirl from Sligo who has to give up her baby. It traces her fraught progress to adulthood, via Milan and Celtic Tiger-era Dublin, with themes of family, loss and love. by Claire Daverley is a well-written romance with depth.
At first, the story seems to be a predictable one – Nora is about to get married, but is really in love with her best friend , and it will take her many pages to realise this. But it doesn’t quite go the way you think, and Daverley handles sensitive subjects gently, such as dealing with trauma and loss.
It’s a thoughtful take on the institution of marriage and what it really means to know and love someone. by Bobby Palmer has a beguiling conceit: it’s a love story told by everyone but the main characters, an aspiring director and an actor. The drama is related by the couple’s friends, flatmates and strangers, all giving their version of events. One for those who loved – true crime books aren’t my thing.
But this nasty story, about the serial fraudster who posed as an au pair around Ireland, is weirdly fascinating, raising as many questions as it answers. It reads like a podcast; Bradley also directed the
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