Fiction

  • Different Colonisations

    There’s a Monster behind the Door, by Gaëlle Bélem, trans Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Bullaun Press, 176 pp, €14.95, ISBN: 978-1739842369 The Rarest Fruit, by Gaëlle Bélem, trans Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Bullaun Press, 224 pp, €14.95, ISBN: 978-1739842383 There’s a Monster behind the Door is a propulsive picaresque tale of a young…

  • Don’t Make a Fuss

    Munichs, by David Peace, Faber & Faber, 464 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-0571381166 The triumphs and tragedies of leading football clubs mean a great deal to many people. But while their fortunes, on and off the pitch, receive blanket media coverage, they rarely feature in literary fiction. One of the few authors who has approached the…

  • We Done It

    We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, Viking, 464 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-0241608364 Want a cosy mystery that takes place partly in Dublin, Cork, and RTÉ’s studios? We Solve Murders fits the bill. How about a cosy mystery with a grand, idiosyncratic detective champion? That’s not We Solve Murders. Marple. Maigret. Marlowe. Holmes. Poirot. Montalbano. Gamache….

  • Sweeney Astray

    Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 218 pp, £18.99, ISBN: 978-1399617789 Modern Times, by Cathy Sweeney, The Stinging Fly Press, 148 pp, €15, ISBN: 978-1906539832 ‘A Story Of Our Time: Notes on Kafka’s The Judgement’, by Cathy Sweeney, The Stinging Fly, Issue 44, Volume 2: Summer 2021 ‘“First Love” by Samuel Beckett’, by Cathy…

  • Live Differently

    Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery, Bloomsbury, 230 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-1526612120 ‘There was nothing special about our seed,’ says the eponymous narrator, Michael, to his pregnant lover in John McGahern’s 1979 novel The Pornographer, a line echoed, unintentionally or otherwise, in the title of Nicole Flattery’s bracingly provocative debut novel, Nothing Special. Though Flattery’s restrained…

  • Westward Dreams

    The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 400 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1524712396 Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 192 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1447294016 ‘Tell a dream and lose a reader,’ Henry James warned us, but Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been listening. For sixty years he’s been writing novels that, at critical moments, use dreams to spin parables…