Month: March 2024

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Women’s Prize Nonfiction Shortlist 2024

In 2024 The Women’s Prize created a new prize to raise the profile and awareness of women authors writing nonfiction.

They began with a list of 16 titles, from gripping memoirs and polemic narratives, to groundbreaking investigative journalism and revisionist history. It featured seven debut writers, two international bestsellers, two poets and five journalists. You can see the longlist here.

From Sixteen to Six Titles

The longlist has now been whittled down to six books covering a broad range of subjects – from life writing, religion, art and history, to AI, social media and online politics. What links them is an originality of voice and an ability to turn complex ideas and personal trauma into inventive, compelling and immersive prose.

“Our magnificent shortlist is made up of six powerful, impressive books that are characterised by the brilliance and beauty of their writing and which each offer a unique, original perspective. The readers of these books will never see the world – be it through art, history, landscape, politics, religion or technology – the same again.” Suzannah Lipscomb, Chair of Judges

The six titles shortlisted are:

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming (UK) (Art History & Grief)

‘We see with everything that we are’

On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career.

What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Canada) (Mistaken Identity)

– When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable?

To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.

This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Pakistan/UK) (Nature Writing Memoir)

– Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes – their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the ‘flat place’ she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain’s landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession.

Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape – a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (US) (History)

– In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.

That, in itself, is a story. But it’s not the whole story. How does one uncover the lives of people who, in their day, were considered property? Harvard historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward. All That She Carried gives us history as it was lived, a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia (India/UK) (Technology)

– What does it mean to be human in a world that is rapidly changing thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, of automated decision-making that both draws on and influences our behaviour?

Through the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Madhumita Murgia, AI Editor at the FT, exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency – and shatter our illusion of free will.

AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small. In this compelling work, Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.

How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair (Jamaica) (Memoir)

– There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved.

Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything: nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path.

Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books and poetry. But as Safiya’s imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it ever greater clashes with her father. Soon she realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how?

In seeking to understand the past of her family, Safiya Sinclair takes readers inside a world that is little understood by those outside it and offers an astonishing personal reckoning. How to Say Babylon is an unforgettable story of a young woman’s determination to live life on her own terms.

The Winner

The winner will be announced on the 13th of June 2024.

Have you read any of these titles? Anything here interest you? Leave a comment below letting us know if you have read or intend to read any of these titles.

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Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Shortlist 2024

Earlier this month the shortlists were announced for the New Zealand Book Awards 2024. All four of the shortlisted authors have won the prize before. You can read my post on the 8 novels that made the longlist here.

Eleanor Catton, who won the Booker Prize in 2013 for The Luminaries,(my review) is a finalist for her novel Birnam Wood (my review).

Emily Perkins, who won the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry in 2009 for Novel About My Wife is shortlisted with Lioness. (I read and enjoyed it, but not reviewed)

Pip Adam, who won the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize in 2018 for The New Animals (recently read but not reviewed) is in the running with Audition. (On my bookshelf!)

Stephen Daisley, who won the first awarded Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize in 2016 for Coming Rain is a contender this year with A Better Place.

Judge’s Comment

Juliet Blyth, convenor of judges for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, says there is much to celebrate among this year’s shortlisted novels, and readers will be rewarded by the richness contained within their pages.

“These four singular and accomplished titles encompass pertinent themes of social justice, violence, activism, capitalism, war, identity, class, and more besides. Variously confronting, hilarious, philosophical, and heart-rending, these impressive works showcase Aotearoa storytellers at the top of their game.”

The Shortlist

The four novels shortlisted for the fiction prize, along with judges’ comments are:

Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

NZ book awards 2024 shortlist

Audition by Pip Adam, Te Herenga Waka University Press – [Science Fiction/Dystopia]

– A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves – experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

A novel, part science fiction, part social realism that asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

Judges’ Comment

Three giants hurtle through the cosmos in a spacecraft called Audition powered by the sound of their speech. If they are silent, their bodies continue to grow. Often confronting and claustrophobic, but always compelling, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much space and what role stories play in mediating truth. A mind-melting, brutalist novel, skillfully told in a collage of science fiction, social realism, and romantic comedy.

A Better Place  by Stephen Daisley, Text – [WWII visceral novel]

– a novel about brothers at war, empathy and the aftermath. Aged 19 in 1939, Roy and his twin brother Tony enlist in the NZ Infantry Brigade. They fight in Crete where Tony dies. Burdened by the loss of his brother, Roy continues to Africa and Europe.

Beautifully written, brutal, tender and visceral, A Better Place is about love in its many forms.

Judges’ Comment

The tragedies of war and prevailing social attitudes are viewed with an unflinching but contemporary eye as Stephen Daisley’s lean, agile prose depicts faceted perspectives on masculinity, fraternity, violence, art, nationhood and queer love in this story about twin brothers fighting in WW2. With its brisk and uncompromising accounts of military action, and deep sensitivity to the plights of its characters, A Better Place is by turns savage and tender, absurd and wry.

eco thriller tech billionaire New Zealand

Birnam Wood  by Eleanor Catton, Te Herenga Waka University Press – [Eco Mystery/Thriller(y)]

– an eco-thriller of sorts that considers intentions, actions, and consequences, an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival. Featuring green activists, politician farmer and his wife, a tech billionaire and the lone wolf investigative journalist with a past.

Judges’ Comment

When Mira Bunting, the force behind guerilla gardening collective Birnam Wood, meets her match in American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, the stage is set for a tightly plotted and richly imagined psychological thriller. Eleanor Catton’s page-turner gleams with intelligence, hitting the sweet spot between smart and accessible. And like an adrenalised blockbuster grafted on to Shakespearian rootstock, it accelerates towards an epic conclusion that leaves readers’ heads spinning.

Lioness by Emily Perkins, Bloomsbury – [Literary Fiction/Blended Family, Second Wife Drama]

– a novel of a woman’s self doubt and shifting place in second family’s and relationships.

Trevor and Therese are a power couple living in the capital city, he is a developer and she runs a chain of fashion boutiques. That’s the exterior. At home, there is his adult family (issues) to contend with and her uncertain place in a scenario that is rapidly shifting when his deals come under scrutiny and his children make increasing demands. Increasingly, she finds refuge elsewhere, inviting another kind of risk into her precarious existence.

Judges’ Comment

After marrying the older, wealthier Trevor, Teresa Holder has transformed herself into upper-class Therese Thorn, complete with her own homeware business. But when rumours of corruption gather around one of Trevor’s property developments, the fallout is swift, and Therese begins to reevaluate her privileged world. Emily Perkins weaves multiple plotlines and characters with impressive dexterity. Punchy, sophisticated and frequently funny, Lioness is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity.

Winner Announced

The winners will be announced on 15 May during the Auckland Writer’s Festival.

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Dublin Literary Award Shortlist 2024

Back in January, the Dublin Literary Award 2024 announced a longlist of 70 books nominated by 80 libraries including librarians and readers, from 35 countries around the world.

Six novels have now been shortlisted for the award, featuring authors who are American, Canadian, Australian, Romanian and Irish, nominated by public libraries in Romania, Germany, Jamaica, Canada and Australia.

The only one I have read, and it was a 5 star read for me is Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time (see my review here) I include the judges’ comments below to help you decide if you are interested in reading any of the nominated titles.

Solenoid sounds interesting and has been highly praised, but 840 pages is too grand of an ask for this reader. Praiseworthy is tempting, but again 740 pages!

The Shortlist of Six Novels

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (literary fiction)

– Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home in Dalkey, overlooking the sea. His peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask about a traumatic, decades-old case. A case that Tom never came to terms with. His peace is further disturbed by a young mother who asks for his help. And what of Tom’s wife, June, and their two children? A beautiful, haunting novel about what we live through, what we live with, and what will survive of us.

Judges’ Comments

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry is a book about love. It’s a world of precarious balancing, a high wire act in which the ghosts of the past intermingle with the challenges of the present. Here a retired policeman settling into a new stage in his life faces the legacy of an old case. This exploration of trauma, childhood abuse in catholic institutions, memory and the lingering impact of loss is devastating. It deftly avoids the trap of solely being one note in that regard. Barry does something clever here where he elevates the work beyond the confines of its themes into a reading experience that often feels transcendent despite the painful subject matter. It’s impossible to read this novel and not be moved by its mercurial power, the ways in which it shifts ideas of human consciousness. This is a beautiful and, in some ways, tender work. Full of heart, risk and that illusive, rare quality the best storytellers possess, it marks Barry, one of our most gifted talents as a writer who continues to invigorate the novel form. 

‘Outstanding, a revelatory and deeply affecting work. Barry’s meditation on trauma, memory and loss is a book about love that lingers in the body long after reading it.’ — Irenosen Okojie, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter (Romania)

– Based on Cărtărescu’s own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist’s life and spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics.

On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. Grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life.

Combining fiction, autobiography and history, Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art within the Communist present.

Judges’ Comments

We can imagine (it not fully grasp) a world that has, in comparison to our own, an extra dimension.” In some respects, this is the world of Solenoid. The city of Bucharest in which the narrator is a teacher and failed writer is a place in which what appears to be an abandoned factory contains unexpected caverns, tunnels and a gallery of enormous parasites, where an apparently ordinary, run-down house is built upon an electrical device that causes people lying in bed to float. By turns wildly inventive, philosophical, and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little known to English-language readers. Sean Cotter’s translation of the novel sets out to change that situation, capturing the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cărtărescu’s work to an entirely new readership.

‘An anti-novel that for all intents and purposes should not exist but still does despite itself, thanks to the overpowering talents of the author and the translator.’ — Anton Hur,  2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Haven by Emma Donoghue (Ireland) (historical fiction)

– In 7th-century Ireland, a scholar/priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks – young Trian & old Cormac – he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. With only faith to guide them and drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find a steep, bare island, inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean? What they find is the extraordinary island now known as Skellig Michael.

Judges’ Comments

A novel of stylistic precision yet ethical complexity, Haven tells the story of three monks in seventh-century Ireland in search of a place of retreat from worldly temptation. Their journey by boat to a barren islet allows the com- plex interaction between experience and idealism to be revealed and subtly explores the importance of evolving human bonds in shaping community. Haven’s searching treatment of authority, and the tensions between rigid beliefs and openness of thought, extend beyond interpersonal dynamics to our relationship with the natural environment. The world Emma Donoghue creates in this novel is at once strange and familiar, provoking us to think deeply about the importance of human empathy in navigating our place on this earth.

‘A novel of stylistic precision yet ethical com- plexity, Haven offers a searching treatment of authority, examining the implications of fixed beliefs for our relationships with each other and with the more-than-human world.’ — Lucy Collins, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge 

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (USA/Jamaica) (Short Stories)

–  In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated by what their younger son calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and sly commentary, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and white supremacy.

Judges’ Comments

Jonathan Escoffery’s energetic novel-in-stories, If I Survive You, follows a Jamaican family living hand-to-mouth in Florida. The different members of the family search for a foothold in this new and exhausting country, each in their own way, struggling against poverty, racism, recession and hurricanes. At the heart of the story lies a deep-rooted racial ambiguity; where does one belong and is it possible to be “a little of this and a little of that” and still find your way, find your people, find a future? The story also deals with the universal condition of fatherly rejection and sibling rivalry, with a remarkable eye for perfect de- tails. The narrative is vibrant, humorous, snappy and quietly devastating; eight interlinking stories told by various voices, often from an urgent and empathetic second-person point of view, and also in Jamaican dialect, that describe how life keeps knocking the family back in their pursuit of identity and happiness.

‘A fresh voice in fiction, Jonathan Escoffery blurs the lines between the short story and the novel in a work that brings us into the lives of Jamaican-Americans in Miami. Through linked stories, the form mirrors the lives of the characters and their struggles to connect, both with their families, and with the society around them.’ — Chris Morash, 2024 Dublin Literary Non-Voting Chair

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (Canada) (Historical Fiction)

– It’s 1929, and Baxter is considered lucky, as a Black man, to have a job as a porter on a train that crisscrosses the continent. He has to smile and nod for the white passengers when they call him ‘George.’ He’s obsessed with teeth, and saving up tips for dentistry school.

On this trip, the passengers are unruly, especially when the train is stranded for days – their secrets leak out, blurring with Baxter’s sleep-deprivation hallucinations. When he finds an illicit postcard of two men, Baxter’s longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with it or his memories of a certain Porter Instructor.

Judges’ Comments

An unconventional historical novel that combines meticulous research and deep imagination, The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr takes readers on a vividly depicted train ride in the 1920’s from the perspective of a Black and queer sleeping car porter as he tries to make a life that is a little less precarious and a lot more hopeful despite the odds stacked against him. As the train travels through the rural Canadian landscape, Baxter, the porter of the title, similarly traverses the vistas of memory, the reality that surrounds him, and his hopes and visions of the future on his own interior journey of discovery and self-creation. Written in a concise yet evocative style, this slim novel combines the epic scope of history with the lift and verve of ghost stories and queer narrative, creating a quietly propulsive read that at the same time takes stock of an entire life in the space of a single train voyage.

“He drinks melting glacier, plunges his hands into the water past the point of ice just to wake himself up and calm himself down. He ascends into the vestibule, his legs shaky, his hands icy numb.”

‘You can almost taste the exhaustion and despair in this quiet, yet vivid, story of a black man working as a porter on a sleeper train in Canada in 1929. Beautifully written, melancholy but never without hope.’— Ingunn Snaedel, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Australia) (Literary fiction)

–  In a small town in northern Australia dominated by a haze cloud, a crazed visionary sees donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in the dance of moths and butterflies. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful.

Praiseworthy is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

Judges’ Comments

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory about a pernicious haze that settles over a northern Australia town yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65,000 years of aboriginal survival. Intimate while epic, the family drama at its center reads like chamber music on a symphonic scale. Wright has authored a blisteringly funny book, replete with situations and speech that elicit wild laughter – a laughter through tears we may recognize from our readings of Beckett and Kafka. She has also written a beautiful one: time and again Praiseworthy delivers unforgettable images, from ‘aerial rivers’ of dancing butterflies to hordes of stinking donkeys. Startlingly original, fiercely political, uncompromising in every respect, Praiseworthy expands the possibility of the novel form.

‘Funny and fierce, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65 000+ years of aboriginal survival.’ — Daniel Medin, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Reading From Libraries

The novels nominated and shortlisted for the Award will be available for readers to borrow from Dublin City Libraries and from public libraries around Ireland, or can be borrowed as eBooks and some as eAudiobooks on the free Borrowbox app, available to all public library users.

Have you read any of the shortlist? Are you tempted by any of these titles? Let me know in the comments below.

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In Ordinary Time, Fragments of a Family History by Carmel McMahon #ReadingIrelandMonth24

In Ordinary Time is one of those wonderful finds, when a number of your own disparate interests collide and someone has managed to put together a work that spans years, across two countries, reflecting on different events in their own life and the background of a country and culture’s history, with these continuous threads running through it, that make it almost seamless.

In a hybrid memoir, Carmel McMahon has written fragments of a family history, structuring them into four parts of three chapters, beginning with Part One: Imbolc: February, The Feast of Saint Brigid and ending in Part Four Samhain: January, Notes on A Return where the story comes full circle.

There are 21 black and white illustrations scattered throughout the text, ordinary photos that amplify the message and create a sense of travel through time. I looked back at the index page for each photo and scribbled my penciled note underneath it, such was the joy of words meeting image.

Full circle feels appropriate to describe a work that despite that linear structure of months and parts, is not that. Rather, it represents points on the spiral of life that goes through cycles; repeating cycles, short cycles, long cycles, interconnected and intergenerational cycles.

Each of the events that she describes in her family history have a shadow history in the culture and while she reflects on her own situation, she finds resonance in the voices of others who have gone before, in particular those whose story we might not have heard, or if we have, might not have been aware of the full picture.

Her story begins somewhere in the middle of her own self-imposed exile, living in New York City. It voyages through her experience with addiction, denial and recovery and ends with the heroine’s return, the learning and this book.

The city had not yet woken on the frigid Sunday morning of February 20, 2011, when the body of a young Irish woman was found outside St. Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village. The news reports cited alcoholism, homelessness, and hypothermia as contributing factors in her death. They said that earlier that month, on St. Brigid’s feast day she had turned thirty-five years old. They said she wanted to be an artist. They said her name was Grace Farrell.

Photo by C1 Superstar on Pexels.com

She questions whether it begins here, or in 1937 when the new Irish state ratified its constitution to reflect a strengthened church-state partnership, that would have a devastating effect on thousands of lives of girls and women and their children, and the unborn future generations who might inherit that affected DNA. All those sent to the Magdalene laundries.

In 1966, her mother would live a version of the shame that surrounded pregnancy out of wedlock, managing to avoid institutional incarceration by disappearing for a while.

Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me – halting, hesitating – that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.

That first sister Michelle, born in London, would be knocked down outside her primary school, three months before Carmel was born. Six more children arrived after her and Michelle’s name was never spoken in their house. The legacy of silence she had been born into continued, was passed on, but not forgotten.

Or did the story begin when she had her first drink at the age of ten, at a family gathering? Feelings of inferiority and shame, dulled by the dregs of the adults drinks that replaced that unwanted feeling with one of warmth, of a circle of golden light.

McMahon left Ireland in the 1990’s and did not return permanently until the pandemic era, 2021. Ironically, it seems to this reader, the return has allowed the distance to reflect on the journey and the learning and to piece the interconnectivity of so many people’s lives past, present and future into this text.

Science has proven and is now able to show how stress and trauma can be passed on biologically from one generation to the next, we read.

We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, “narratives, actions and symptoms.” The stories we tell and don’t tell, the actions we take and don’t take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.

Listening to the podcast On Being, she hears Dr. Rachel Yehuda reminds listeners that:

…we are not in biological prison: experiences and events in our environment can also make positive changes to our programming. We can consciously move towards healing.

These intertwined fragments thus reveal the events, experiences and the slow realisation of all that is working on her, the understanding and the aspects that will aid the healing.

Photo by Jessie Crettenden on Pexels.com

There are the endless jobs she tries to hold down, while numbing herself nightly; the visits back home precipitated by tragedy, the road trip across America, an escape that brings her closer to understanding loss and aloneness.

The industrial ghost towns, the late spring rain, the wide, low skies. The old sadness rising. An excess of black bile, they used to say, made the melancholic personality. Freud said that mourning and melancholia are akin in that they are both responses to loss. Mourning is a conscious and healthy response to the loss of a love object. Melancholia is more complicated. It operates on a subconscious level. All the feelings of loss are present, but for what? The melancholic cannot say. This, Freud says, is a pathology.

McMahon reads and shares anecdotes and reflections on the lives of other women who immigrated before her; the young Irish immigrant Maeve Brennan who was a staff writer at the New Yorker before the disease of alcoholism colonized her life; Mary Smith, one of many Irish women used for gynecological experiments in New York hospitals in the mid nineteenth century; Grace Farrell.

After a family tragedy, she reads Anne Carson’s Nox, a book of poems created from the notebook she recorded memories and impressions of her brother, in the decade after he died.

She did this, she tells us, because a brother does not end. He goes on.

She reflects on the Famine, on the role of church and state, on the complicit silences and forgetting, on the advances that were made at the expense of the vulnerable, the now removed statues, the little known memorials of the unnamed. She acknowledges the collective impact of a nation’s traumas on individuals and families with brief insights (her own and Carl Jung’s) into a way forward, towards speaking up, sharing stories, creating meaning, allowing space for healing, for moving towards the light, to enable the passing on of a lighter legacy to future generations.

Sharing her story is part of that, not just for the writer herself, but for those who might find resonance in her journey, towards their own. And to remember the forgotten, the ordinary women like Mary Smith.

I could not put this book down, despite wishing to make it last. Though it is a collection of essays, some of which have been previously published, the threads that run through it make it read like a memoir, perfectly balancing the personal stories with the background history, questioning the effect of both on a young woman’s psyche.

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

Guardian Review: In Ordinary Times: the trials of inherited trauma, Carmel Mc Mahon uses her own story of emigration, uncertainty and alcoholism as one thread in a wider historical tapestry

RTE Radio1 Interview: Carmel McMahon on The Ryan Tubridy Show – (18 mins) – on New York, family tragedy, drinking and the legacy of ‘pidgin emotion’

Guardian Books: Anne Enright: In search of the real Maeve Brennan

JSTOR: Owens, Deidre Cooper, Irish Immigrant Women and American Gynecology: In Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, 89–107. University of Georgia Press, 2017. 

Carmel Mc Mahon, Author

Carmel Mc Mahon grew up in County Meath, and lived in New York City from 1993 – 2021, when she returned with her partner to renovate a house on Ireland’s west coast.

A graduate of CUNY, her writing has been published in the Irish Times, Humanities Review, Roanoke Review, Longreads and shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Award.

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The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak has been an author I have followed for many years now, one of the first authors I encountered before starting to read a lot of women in translation, who came from a non English speaking culture, who wrote stories that came from a cultural understanding that was not British or American, even if that was the audience she hoped to attract.

Since those first novels, she now writes in English and no longer lives in Istanbul. Since moving to London she has become more widely known. This book was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 and the former Costa Novel Award. It is the 5th of her novels I have read. She also writes essay style non-fiction.

Review

In The Island of Missing Trees, she again takes the reader into another culture, to the island of Cyprus; a land with a long history that arrived at a point, where its humans decided to divide on their differences, here it was via origin, Turkish Cypriot or Greek Cypriot.

You belonged to one group or the other and were not supposed to stray. Until they created this divided line, young people would do what is natural for them to do before external influences corrupt their thinking, they develop friendships, they fall in love, they take risks. They get sent away, banned, forbidden from…

Physical Separation denies Ancestral Lineage

The story begins in London, late 2010’s with Ada, a daughter, at school on the last day of term. Ada lives with her father Kostas, her mother Defne has recently passed away. They are given a holiday assignment to write an essay, asked to interview an elderly member, they will be studying migration and generational change.

Ada dropped her gaze. She had never met her relatives on either side. She knew they lived in Cyprus somewhere but that was about the extent of her knowledge. What kind of people were they? How did they spend their days? Would they recognise her if they passed her on the street or bumped into each other in the supermarket?

Ada has never visited Cyprus, her parents only ever made excuses when she asked about family, gradually she would sense that her parents marriage had not been approved by their families. That she too was not approved.

Yet for as long as she was able to, Ada had retained the hopeful belief that if any of her extended family were to spend time with her and her parents, they would forgive them for whatever it was they had not been forgiven for.

Are Trees Conscious? A Fig Gives Voice

Photo by Daniel Watson on Pexels.com

Ada’s father digs up and buries their fig tree to protect it from the harsh winter. The fig is not in its natural climate or environment and special measures are required to keep it alive. The tree is given a narrative voice in the novel. It was a sapling from the island, it came from a mother fig that grew in the middle of a tavern, where Ada’s parents used to meet. In this way, the fig is all seeing.

The fig tree is a metaphor for the uprooted, the displaced, for the migrant, for the old ways. It is a symbol for not forgetting. It represents something of the motherland for the migrant and the way it lives through the seasons demonstrates something to humans about how to be.

Arboreal-time is equivalent to story-time – and, like a story, a tree does not grow in perfectly straight lines, flawless curves or exact right angles, but bends and twists and bifurcates into fantastical shapes, throwing out branches of wonder and arcs of invention.
They are incompatible, human-time and tree-time.

After a terrible last day at school, Ada arrives home to learn that her mother’s sister is coming to visit. She rages. She will have the opportunity to address the void within her where it resides.

Half hiding in the shadows, she watched the two adults by the fig tree, drawn to the strangeness of their behaviour but equally detached from them, as if witnessing someone else’s dream.

A Third Culture Kid Awakens

The novel explores what it is to be raised in another culture, severed from one’s own, as if not knowing it is enough to disconnect, as if assimilation is a cure for forgetting one’s past, one’s lineage, one’s identity. It demonstrates the effect of that denial, that severance, the dysfunction that arrives when one is deprived of a connection to one’s roots. And how differently each person deals with grief and loss.

It returns to Cyprus and slowly reveals the story of Ada’s parents that lead up to their separation and reuniting and the impossibility of being able to live there, the sacrifice that leaving demanded of them, the consequence.

A tree is a memory keeper. Tangled beneath our roots, hidden inside our trunks, are the sinews of history, the ruins of war nobody came to win, the bones of the missing.

The story is presented from different perspectives, showing the different realities that life is lived from depending on where one had been planted, uprooted from and replanted. It is a thought provoking read that doesn’t provide answers but offers to expand the reader’s awareness of the complications humans live under when love disrespects the rigid outlook that communities adhere to.

It shows the ripple effect of staying and/or leaving and the strangeness of being the protege of that, growing up in foreign lands that they have then acclimated to, except for the deep unsettled feeling that runs through their veins.

There is a delightful twist at the end that made me remember first encountering Elif Shafak and her describing her own childhood, of the stories her grandmother would tell, the superstitions she held. Here, I thought, is that little girl’s imagination, still going strong, writing novels that go deep into the realities of the human experience but are not above allowing something of the magic and wonder of an unbound imagination to run free.

Further Reading

Interview, Guardian: Elif Shafak: I’ve Always Believed in Inherited Pain

My Reviews of Honour, Three Daughters of Eve, The Happiness of Blond People,

Elif Shafak, Author

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and a champion of women’s rights and freedom of expression. Her books have been translated into fifty-five languages.

Her novels include The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, The Architect’s Apprentice, Three Daughters of Eve, Honour, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which was a finalist for the 2019 Booker Prize, and The Island of Missing Trees, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.

She is also the author of a memoir, Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood.

She is a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. Shafak was awarded the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to ‘the renewal of the art of storytelling.’ An active political commentator, columnist, and public speaker, she lives in London. 

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Where I End by Sophie White

March is Reading Ireland month and I have been in an early spring mode since mid Feb, attending to other activities, nature excursions, writing and editing projects, reading and listening to texts while reflecting elsewhere. There is a new energy present that demands it of me and I follow it contentedly.

I did write some notes on one Irish book I have read this month. I love to participate in Cathy’s March reading month, so here it is. I will continue (intend) to read Irish literature this year, although I am making writing and editing more of a priority, so there may be fewer reviews here.

Review

This was an unusual read for me, not the kind of novel I usually choose, one I selected because I admire the Irish publisher Tramp Press, who publish Doireann Ní Griofa and Sara Baume.

Where I End might be horror, but I’m not even sure since I’ve never read that genre before. It was described by the Irish Independent as

‘a truly different Irish novel. One that entwines Irish myth, the reality of human bodies, life and death, and traditional gothic horror in a macabrely beautiful and, in the end, redemptive dance.’

The novel won the Shirley Jackson Award (2023), an award that recognises ‘outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic’, voted on by writers, critics, editors, and academics.

It depicts a short period in the life of a teenage daughter caring for a mute, incapacitated mother, who appears to have been that way since she was a baby. Her paternal grandmother, who also lives with them is about to start a job that will absent her from the house, allowing Aoileann a freedom and recklessness she has not until now experienced.

It reminded me of the experience of reading another Irish author, Jan Carson’s The Firecatchers because it depicts a character who has no faculty for empathy. But the feeling that it evoked was different, White’s character Aoileann compels the reader to want to stay with her and find out if there will be a transformation, a redemption, despite all the signs of foreboding.

The decision to end this thing comes on slowly, like light filling a room after a fathomless night. It began like this:

The opening line of the first chapter. We observe her as carer of ‘the thing’ which I ask myself, is that her mother? And when she occasionally uses that word, I realise, yes it is.

There is a question I have never asked. On the nights that we find her far from her bed, her ragged hands reaching towards nothing, the idea prods me. Is the bedthing trying to get away? Are we doing this to her?

This the mystery is seeded. Why does this young woman who daily cares for her immobile mother refer to her in such a way? What happened that this situation should have come about and why doesn’t anyone know what goes on here? Why do people look at her strangely and spit as she passes by?

In the opening pages before chapter one, she describes the three things that describe her limited world. My mother. My home. My house. A woman trapped inside a body, a small insular community living on an island, three women living in a house no one visits, except the man.

The islanders all share a similar look, the result of genetic material passed back and forth for so many generations – it has distilled into a distinct, unpleasant appearance. Móraí has it too. Me, less so as my mother is from the outside; Dad is the same as me – a little watered down because his father was also a mainlander.

It is a disturbing read that the arrival of a visitor, an artist with a young baby at first seems like an opportunity for growth and healing, but increasingly becomes another avenue of dysfunction, a creeping fear of what is in danger of happening.

It speaks to both the fear and allure of the outsider, of the extremes of dysfunction that a lack of maternal nurturing and love can bring and the desire to overcome and escape all of that.

The writing and descriptions were brilliant, moving between enticing literary prowess and elements of the macabre. Somehow this is balanced out in a way that made me both wary of what was coming but unable to stop turning the pages.

Very well portrayed, a haunting, compelling read.

Further Reading

Irish Times Interview, Sophie White, Where I End – a horror about a young woman’s attempts to find motherly love, and to get to the bottom of family secrets that made her who she is. Niamh Donnelly

Sophie White, Author

SOPHIE WHITE is a writer and podcaster from Dublin. Her first four books, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill, 2016), Filter This (Hachette, 2019), Unfiltered (Hachette, 2020) and The Snag List (Hachette, 2022), have been bestsellers and award nominees. Her fifth book, the bestselling memoir Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows (Tramp Press, 2021), was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction.

Sophie writes a weekly column ‘Nobody Tells You’ for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine and she has been nominated for Journalist of the Year at the Irish Magazine Awards, Columnist of the Year at the Irish Newspaper Awards and for a Special Recognition Award at the Headline Mental Health Media Awards.

TV adaptations of her first two novels are in development and she is co-host of the comedy podcasts Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive. In addition to writing literary horror, Sophie has written commercial fiction titles for Hachette, such as the recent My Hot Friend.