The latest addition to my website is Joyce Cary‘s The Horse’s Mouth. This is the third book in Cary’s first trilogy and far the best-known, primarily because of the character of the narrator/protagonist Gulley Jimson and also because of the the film of the book starring Alec Guinness. Jimson is a thorough rogue, continually cheating, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joyce Cary‘s To Be a Pilgrim. This is the second in the trilogy, which started with Herself Surprised. This one tells the story of Tom Wilcher, last of his generation of Wilchers, an old man with heart problems. It is set just before World War II, as he … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joyce Cary‘s Herself Surprised. This is the first in a trilogy which primarily aims to give, in each volume, the points of view of the three main characters. This one gives the point of view of Sara Monday. She starts as a housekeeper, marries the son of the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Austin Clarke‘s The Sun Dances at Easter. This is a story set around a thousand years ago, involving Irish myths and legends and the relationship between pagan Ireland and early Christianity in that country. Orla, the heroine, cannot get pregnant and is advised to visit the Well of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Austin Clarke‘s The Singing Men at Cashel. This is a novel that was published eighty years ago but was never reprinted (partially because it was banned in Ireland) and is now quite difficult to obtain. Clarke was part of the Celtic Twilight movement, which saw Irish writers looking … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eimear McBride‘s The Lesser Bohemians. Many critics raved about her first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. I did not share their enthusiasm, finding her disjointed sentences distracting and annoying without adding anything to the book. This novel starts … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michael Hughes‘ The Countenance Divine. This is an apocalyptic vision of England with the story told in four periods. In the first period we follow John Milton and his secretary, with the story culminating in the Great Fire of London. The second part features the poet William Blake … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lisa McInerney‘s Glorious Heresies. The novel is about what McInerney calls the arse end of Ireland. It is set in a grim part of Cork. All the main characters, without exception, are variously drunks, drug addicts, drug dealers, abusers, rapists, prostitutes, murderers (at least three of the main … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Anne Enright‘s The Green Road. Enright is definitely making a claim to be the best living Irish novelist and this novel will only add to her reputation. It tells the story of a contemporary, somewhat (but not too) dysfunctional family, the Madigans, who live in West Clare. At … Read more
It was my plan to read around twenty Russian novels one after the other but, in the meantime, a few books arrived that I really wanted to read, so there is now a brief interruption to the Russian reading, which will be resumed shortly. The latest addition to my website is Máirtín Ó Cadhain‘s Cré … Read more