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The piece examines a new Irish novel that tackles the themes of connection, grief, and fate against the backdrop of a mysterious canal, while reviewing fresh autumn titles, noting the author's mother‑daughter motif, a haunted‑house tale about sisters, and the significance of place in his prize‑winning short story collection Fen set in the English Fens
is a novel about trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing to find connection. It is aboutis a retelling set on a very murky canal where there might, or might not, be a creature hidden beneath the water.
It is a novel about language, grief, fate. It was a tremendous experience to be shortlisted in that way, not knowing it was a possibility. It gave me the opportunity to keep writing. New books for autumn: A bumper crop of Irish and international readsThe Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis: An eerie moodscape built through story I grew up with that beautifully illustrated D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths for children.
It was very formative in my love and understanding of stories and the possibility of magic and strangeness. Mothers and daughters seem to be a recurring theme, as in Sisters, your second novel. Tell us about Sisters and why that theme might recur.is a haunted-house novel about two sisters named September and July, who are forced to leave their home and move to a tiny cottage with their grief-filled mother.
I like writing about the entanglements of family, the bonds that hold us together even when we should part. It is a novel inspired by Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison.. She wrote about digging beautiful caves out from behind her characters and this is always in my mind when I write, an act which so often feels like digging. Your debut short story collection Fen won the Edge Hill Prize in 2017.
Did it have an over-arching theme? Fen is an interlinked short story collection set in that dark, flat land, the English Fens. They are uncanny stories about women and girls and the land. The Fens and desolate countryside are a common setting for your work.
How important is location in your fiction? It is vital. So often if something is not working in a draft it is because the location is either wrong or not securely set in my mind. The setting is not simply a place within which the characters move, it is a character in itself and very tangled up in the themes and issues of the book.
Long fiction is a marathon and stamina is important. Holding something that big and unwieldy in your head is hard, trying to see the through line that carries you and the reader through. It is exciting to have that much space and potential. Short stories are unforgiving because nothing can be out of place in the plot or the writing, there is no space for a bad note.
At the same time there is something very beautiful about the brevity which allows for it to exist fully in the writer’s mind and be turned and examined. I grew up with horror writers and I love being scared. My writing begins, always, with reading. I love Garth Greenwell,Be brave, strike out from the shore.
They are all beautiful. Helen Garner, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf, Olga Ravn.
“The only true voyage of discovery ... would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. ” ―Betrayal by Luke Harding: A colourful, entertaining take on Trump, Russia and UkraineTimor Mortis: How We Live with Death.
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