A collection featuring an unfinished theological treatise by feminist theologian Mary Daly, a debut novel by Bernie McQuillan about a community haunted by its past, and a dark comedy by Chloë Ashby about two couples on holiday.
Works by Mary Daly, Bernie McQuillan and Chloë AshbyThis hitherto unknown work by the late feminist theologian Mary Daly is the product of a transitional period between her early attempts to reconcile feminism with Catholicism and her later rejection of reformist solutions in favour of more revolutionary thinking.
Daly’s work is dense, and one gets the sense that this incomplete work is not fully elaborated, however, there is a heartfelt call for an active and thinking “adult” faith beyond mere assent to a narrowly defined series of propositions such as a child in catechism. Many of the theological and institutional limitations Daly penetratingly surveys in both Catholicism and Protestantism still resound today.
Appended with this unfinished treatise are a number of essays from diverse contributors, surveying its context and implications. Orphaned in Donegal in 1985, teenage Kitty fights to stay by her brother Tommy’s side. Tommy and his best friend Finn have grand plans beyond Rathmore, a coastal village morally controlled and corrupted by the doctor, the parish priest and the landed gentry. Kitty’s scramble to gain control of their destinies ends in a shattering double disappearance.
Rotating through the viewpoints of five characters haunted by their roots, the looping plot-driven narrative requires close attention. There is a curious placelessness about the story, with voices lacking regional lilt, nor any big atmospheric shift between the 1980s and 2025, when an inept police investigation reopens. This is an ambitious and intricate debut novel exploring how a community remains a captive to its own past. Two couples and four children take their annual holiday in a country house.
Chloë Ashby places bourgeois-bohemian characters with tangled relationships in a confined situation, and mines the results for dark comedy.reminded me of Chekhov, without the guns and philosophising. The setting is La France profonde in a heatwave, with flashbacks to Edinburgh student days when the characters’ lives and loyalties first began to criss-cross. Loss is a theme – of loved ones, of money, of virginity, of a place, of small children in a big supermarket.
Ashby writes with characteristic eye for detail – the glint of sunlight on a watch, the brief pang as one emotion suppresses another. The deft plotting makes this a novel that preoccupies you even when you’re not reading it. A Better Locksmith by Jane Coyle: Chronicle of an astonishingly fecund time in the theatre of Northern IrelandRóisín Ingle: I don’t care so much about Taylor Swift’s life decisions these days.
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