A new novel by Eowyn Ivey is like no other anticipated novel for me. I still remember the effect of reading her debut The Snow Child, my One Outstanding Read of 2012 and now with Black Woods, Blue Sky, she has created that magic again.
It is extraordinary.
No Madeleine in Sight
The title is a reference to this quote from Marcel Proust:
Now are the woods all black but still the sky is blue May you always see a blue sky overhead my young friend and then even when the time comes which is coming now for me when the woods are black when night is falling you will be able to console yourself as I am doing by looking up to the sky.
A Nature vs Nurture Conundrum
On the cover, we see the blue sky and the black woods and an image of a standing bear, whose shadow is a man.
It is the story of troubled Birdie, her six year old daughter Emaleen and a reclusive character Arthur, who Birdie is entranced by. In the opening scene Birdie awakens with a hangover, goes off into the woods with a fishing line, leaving her daughter alone sleeping, forgetting to take her rifle.
The large more fearsome grizzly bears were rarely seen, leaving only paw prints or piles of scat in the woods. But now and then, a bear would surprise you. They were too smart to be entirely predictable.
This entire scene is a foreshadowing of the novel, of the attempt of a young, single mother to do right, who doesn’t have sufficient awareness of certain red lines she should not cross, which have nothing to do with the depth of love she has for her child and the determination to do better than how she was mothered.
Though she doesn’t yet know him that well, and despite his odd way of being and other clues that might make her question going off to be with him, she and her daughter depart for the cabin in the mountains where Arthur dwells, not realising they will be living off the grid.
Arthur has some strange tendencies that Birdie tries to understand. Emaleen understands more than her mother and is both sympathetic to him and afraid of him.
The novel charts their relationship and brings the Akaskan landscape and botanical life alive, in all its beauty and bite.
The novel is told in three parts, each one introduced with a black and white pencil illustration of a native Alaskan plant, one that symbolically has something to say about what will pass.
It is also a study in the nature of the bear, of the similarity of some of their their instincts to humans.
A sow grizzly appeared to care for her cubs with the same tender exasperation as a human mother, and when threatened by a bear twice her size, she wouldn’t hesitate to put herself between the attacker and her offspring. She was the most formidable animal in all of the Alaska wilderness, a sow defending her cub.
In the Wilderness Pay Attention
While the initial period of their stay is encouraging, the signs of discontent are already present and like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, Birdie’s judgement is impaired.
It was impossible, what Birdie wanted. To go alone, to experience the world on her own terms. But also, to share it all with Emaleen.
In an attempt to try and appease Birdie, he suggests she takes a day to herself, to be free as she desires. All is well until she is lured by shrubs of blueberries that lead her off course, or was it when she stepped into a ring of mushrooms igniting an age-old curse.
Don’t you dare go blundering into it. That’s what Grandma Jo would say. Witches and fairies danced in a circle here on moonlit nights, the mushrooms sprouting up where their feet touched. If you trespassed inside the circle, they would punish you. You might be forced to dance away the rest of your life in the ring, or, if you escaped, the curse would follow you back home and weave mischief and sorrow through your days.
The novel has a strong element of suspense at the same time as it explores the effect of decisions made by adults on children, on the things that might be overcome and others that are unlikely to. Every character carries something that contributes to our understanding of the story and the responses of the little girl Emaleen highlight much that demands our attention.
Autobiographical Elements
Eowyn Ivey describes Black Woods, Blue Sky as her most personal yet and the most important story she has ever told, with Emaleen being the closest to an autobiographical character she has written. It is a story the author had been trying to figure out how to write her entire life, as she wrote into ‘the darkest fears and most magical memories of childhood’, while demonstrating how people’s choices have a ripple effect through time.
“…the little girl’s fear and sense of magic, the feeling she loves about being so far out in the wilderness of Alaska, but also the thing she is afraid of, that is all directly from me”
It is a heart-stopping, captivating read, unpredictable and nerve-wracking in parts and yet we are able to bear witness, knowing we are safe in the hands of an empathetic, nature loving author, whose authenticity and understanding of human nature resonate throughout the text. Just brilliant.
If you enjoyed The Snow Child, you will love this too. If you haven’t read Eowyn Ivey yet, you’re in for a treat.
Outstanding. Best of 2025.
Author, Eowyn Ivey
Eowyn Ivey is the author of The Snow Child, an international bestseller published in thirty countries, a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of a British Book Award.
Her second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award, and was a Washington Post Notable Book.
A former bookseller and reporter, she was raised in and lives in Alaska.
March is Reading Ireland month, an initiative created by Cathy at 746 Books and it is simply a way of being in community, while reading anything written by Irish authors or that relates to Ireland, there are no fixed rules, just the intention to Read Ireland, whatever that means to you! There’s even a Spotify playlist if you’re interested in a bit of musical culture.
Getting a Jump Start
For me that means reading more Irish authors from my bookshelves. I did read two in January, in fact my first read of 2025 was Donal Ryan’sIrish Book Award 2024 winning, heart, be at peace, a novel about multiple characters in a rural town in County Tipperary facing the different issues that face them a decade or so on from his debut novel The Spinning Heart.
Then I picked up a beautiful second hand hardback Water by John Boyne on holiday, and read it on my flight home. It is the first of four novellas in his The Elements series and now I want to read the next three, Earth, Fire and the final one Air due out in May 2025. But not yet, I’m prioritising what I already have!
Reading From the Shelves
So here is the pile from my bookshelves, from which I will be choosing what to read in March 2025.
There are also three titles languishing on my kindle, which doesn’t get as much attention as it should, because out of sight is out of mind when it comes to reading. So I’m jogging my memory and will try to read at least one of these e-books.
On the kindle I have Listening Still by Anne Griffin, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop by Olivia Fitzsimons and Quickly, While They Still Have Horses by Jan Carson. In physical print I have another CarsonThe Raptures, that I picked up at the annual Ansouis vide grenier in September 2024.
Audrey Magee’sThe Colony (2022) was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel award, so it gained a lot of attention and I have been keen to read it.
When Fiction Reminds Us of Those Who’ve Passed
I really enjoyed Sebastian Barry’sOld God’s Time (2023) and want to read more of his work, so I chose his Dunne Family trio of books, Annie Dunne (2002), A Long Long Way (2005) and On Canaan’s Side (2011) to delve more into his storytelling. I am part way through reading these now.
I love that this collection of novels and the play that was the first in the series, were all inspired by characters from his own ancestral lineage. That inspired me too.
After reading A Long Long Way, I became curious, as I too have an ancestor, born in the same year as his character Willie Dunne (1896), who like Willie, went to France in World War I, was in an Irish regiment and did not return. My ancestor Edmund Costley died on 9 April 1916, in Ypres, West Flanders, Belgium at the age of 19. I’ll be writing a post about him in April.
Historical Re-Imaginings, True Crime, Women’s Lot
I have read two novels by Mary Morrissey, Mother of Pearl (1995) and Penelope Unbound (2023). Morrissey tends to take historical stories and/or characters and re-imagine their lives. Mother of Pearl was inspired by a notorious baby-snatching case in 1950’s Ireland, that she chose to fictionalise, having said that the truth would have come across to readers as unbelievable; while Penelope Unbound re-imagines the life of Nora Barnacle, if in Trieste, Italy, when James Joyce made her wait all day outside a train station for him, she decides to leave.
This year I’m going to read her imagined autobiography, The Rising of Bella Casey (2013); she was the sister of the acclaimed playwright Sean O’Casey, and it is set at the turn of the century Dublin, a social commentary on the lives of women in that era.
Then there is Maggie O’Farrell’sThe Marriage Portrait (2022), another historical re-imagining, this time of the short life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, a sixteenth century member of the renowned aristocratic House of Medici in Italy. I enjoyed O’Farrell’s riveting memoir I Am, I Am, I Am – Seventeen Brushes With Death (2017), the first of her works I read, and then the multiple award-winning, Hamnet (2020) and The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), so I’m looking forward to immersing in this one.
Irish Non-Fiction
There are two non-fiction titles on my pile, Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Claire Wills, author, critic and cultural historian, winner of the Irish Book Award for non-fiction, who has written a family history that blends memoir with social history. She explores the gaps in that history, brought about by Ireland’s brutal treatment of unmarried mother’s and their babies, and a culture of not caring, not looking into or asking questions, rolling back a dark period of its history of loss and forgetting.
The second non-fiction title is the candid Fierce Appetites – lessons from my year of untamed thinking, also subtitled, Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in my Present and in the Writings of the Past by medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle.
The title is a reference to Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments, which is part of what intrigued me, but also the uniqueness of someone finding sense of three dramatic events in their life through medieval literature.
Every day a beloved father dies. Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty.All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning.
Boyle writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put), with unflinching honesty,deep compassion and occasional dark humour.
Remembering Edna O’Brien (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024)
I couldn’t read Ireland without adding a title from Edna O’Brien, who died in 2024 at the age of 93. In 2023, I read The Country Girls trilogy, made up of three stories The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) released in 1986 in a convenient single volume.
Credited with breaking the silence on issues young girls faced growing up in Ireland, it was a subject she would often return to. She was punished for it, but lead the way for others to eventually follow.
O’Brien described her work in this way:
I have depicted women in lonely, desperate, and often humiliated situations, very often the butt of men and almost always searching for an emotional catharsis that does not come. This is my territory and one that I know from hard-earned experience. Edna O’Brien (Roth, 1984, p. 6)
Cathy at 746 Books and Kim at Reading Matters are spending a year reading Edna O’Brien and are reading Country Girls in February, you can see their reading schedule for the year if you go to their blog.
I have decided to read one my shelf, The House of Splendid Isolation (1991), the first book in her Modern Ireland trilogy, a political novel, depicting the relations of an Irish Republican Army terrorist and his hostage, an ageing Irish widow, in a house that represents the troubled nation.
Suggestions, Recommendations?
That’s the selection I have made, no guarantees on what I’ll get through, but I’m looking forward to the immersion. Have you read and enjoyed of the titles I mention above?
Are you going to read any Irish literature in March? Let me know in the comments below.
The International Booker Prize 2025 longlist has been announced by this years judging panel, made up of a novelist, a poet, a translator, a critic and a songwriter, all of whom cross boundaries into other art forms. In their various ways, they are steeped in the world of words.
These are the 13 books they have chosen in the first cut, from 154 books submitted – 11 novels and two collections of short stories, translated from 10 original languages representing 15 nationalities and 11 independent publishers:
The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (Palestine) translated from (Arabic) by Sinan Antoon
– The shocking premise of Azem’s novel can be summed up in a sentence: what would happen if all the Palestinians in Israel suddenly disappeared?
Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance.
That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters – against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.
Spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance, critically acclaimed in its original Arabic edition, is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (Denmark) translated by Barbara J Haveland
– a woman is trapped in a time loop, waking up each morning to find it’s the 18th of November, again and again.The first book of a planned septology. Five books have been published in Danish so far, with translations underway in over 20 countries.
She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced.
But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18th’s of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape.
There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (La Réunion) translated (French) by Karen Fleetwood & Laëtitia Saint-Loubert
– in 1980s La Réunion (an overseas department of France, in the Indian Ocean), a young girl with a zest for life rises up against her jaded, bitter parents.
La Réunion in the ’80s is a place of high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. Here, a little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents’ reign of terror and turns to school for salvation. The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own.
Rich in the history of the island’s customs and superstition and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirise the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you.
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (Romania) translated by Sean Cotter
– partly inspired by the author’s years as a teacher in Romania, spiraling into a bizarre account of history, philosophy and mathematics, with flashes of nightmarish body horror. Said to have been written in a single draft, at 627 pages, the longest book on the list.
Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, the novel grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths.
In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction and history with autobiography – the book is partly based on Cărtărescu’s experiences as a teacher – Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.
Reservoir Bitches (short stories) by Dahlia de la Cerda (Mexico) translated (Spanish) by Heather Cleary & Julia Sanches
– follows the efforts of 13 memorable Mexican woman, from the daughter of a cartel boss to a victim of transfemicide, to survive against the odds.
In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, 13 Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, cheat, cry and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices.
At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (France) translated by Helen Stevenson
– the fictional account of a group of migrants’ attempt to cross the English Channel in an inflatable dinghy, which results in the deaths of 27 of those on board. Told from the point of view of a French woman who received, but rejected, their desperate calls for help.
Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died.
The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?
A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.
Hunchbackby Saou Ichikawa (Japan) translated by Polly Barton
– an unflinching account of sexual desire and disability about a protagonist born with a congenital muscle disorder who uses an electric wheelchair and a ventilator. Hailed as one of Japan’s most important novels of the 21st century.
Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal…
Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (Japan) translated by Asa Yoneda
– leaps back and forth across thousands of years and finds humankind on the verge of extinction, but still clinging to the impulses that make us human.
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.
Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.
Eurotrashby Christian Kracht (Germany) translated by Daniel Bowles
– a Swiss writer named Christian, embarks on a tragicomic road trip with his wealthy, elderly mother in this tragicomic and absurd semi-autobiographical novel.
Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his 80-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past.
Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair’s tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers.
Perfectionby Vincenzo Latronico (Italy) translated by Sophie Hughes
– an expat couple attempt to live their dream in Berlin, but find themselves beset with the dissatisfaction and ennui of the modern world.
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin – in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and Berlin’s 24-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon.
Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp.
With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection is beautifully written and brilliantly scathing.
Heart Lamp (short stories) by Banu Mushtaq (Southern India) translated (Kannada) by Deepa Bhasthi
– the author, an activist and lawyer vividly captures the extraordinary everyday lives of Muslim women and girls in southern India, in 12 stories, originally published in Kannada between 1990 and 2023.
Praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.
On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer (Surinamese-Dutch), translated (Dutch) by Lucy Scott
– a classic of queer literature, as electrifying today as it was when it first appeared in 1982, tells of a courageous Black woman fleeing her abusive husband to embark a new life in the Surinamese capital.
When Noenka’s abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, she flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society’s expectations.
Amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. ‘I’m Noenka,’ she responds resolutely, ‘which means Never Again.’
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (France), translated by Mark Hutchinson
– captures the love and despair of an intense friendship between the book’s narrator and his best friend from childhood, who suffers from severe psychological disorders.
A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel.
Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in her signature style.
Newbies, First Timers and a Classic Translated
Many of the books on the list are by authors being translated into English for the first time, which is a great sign for translated fiction, indicating that publishers and reading more widely and looking further than the already known. Not surprising I haven’t read any of these and only heard of one Solenoid, which won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024. It is not one I will be reading, way too long!
I like the sound of Heart Lamp and On a Woman’s Madness, not just for their premise, but for the language and locations they hail from! The Danish novel, The Calculation of Volume 1 sounds intriguing and something of a cult following, you’ve got to bat for someone who went ahead and self-published and is now being translated into over 20 languages.
Anything on the list tempting you? Let me know in the comments below.
The International Booker Shortlist and Winner 2025
The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, 8 April.
The winning title will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, 20 May.
Seventeen years ago, the author Rosa Ribas was taken by friends to visit a strange monument to a broken era in Seseña; it was a housing development known as ‘The Manhattan of La Mancha’.
Built in 2008, it was designed to house 40,000 people in 13,500 affordable apartments – a ready made settlement emerging from the dust-bowls of remote farmland 40 kilometres from Madrid. It now looked something like between an eerie ghost town and an abandoned building site.
One representation of many, it was a stark reminder of a housing bubble, burst by a rampant, unchecked building boom bust, and a global financial crisis that created an unprecedented unemployment rate and the deepest economic recession Spain had experienced for fifty years.
“When you walked around, you’d see the blocks where people were living, the blocks that were semi-inhabited, and then all the skeletons of buildings in different stages of completion,” she said. “From one day to the next, they told the workers not to come back the following day. And it all stayed like that.”
As night fell and three lights came, the realisation that they were the only people living there spawned the idea for a novel, Lejos in Spanish, now translated by Charlotte Coombe into English, brought to us by an excellent new imprint Foundry Editions, created in 2023 out of a love of these three things:
a love for discovering and sharing new voices, a love for the Mediterranean and the people and lands that surround it, and a love of internationalism and reading across borders.
The patterns on the covers of their books have been designed to capture the visual heritage of the Mediterranean. This one is inspired by the architecture of Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia. It was created by Hélène Marchal.
Far, A Novel
I loved this novel, it is evocative of this semi-abandoned place, it depicts a demarcation between the legals and the illegals, the rightful inhabitants and the opportunistic outsiders, the followers of rules, those that want to make their own, and those that fall into the cracks.
The entire development was constructed on a pile of poorly concealed sleaze, a chain of bribery, corruption, intimidation, and complicit silences. No ancient manuscripts, no mythical foundations. If these lands had been the scene of some momentous event, back when battles of conquest and reconquest were being fought all over the area, no one had bothered to record it. It was a bleak place, devoid of stories, where it was impossible to satisfy any yearnings for greatness.
The entrance to the development still shows billboards offering apartments for sale, the middle one depicting the fugitive developer Fernando Pacheco in his suit and tie, the others depicting scenes of golfing, swimming pools and cocktails, a far cry from the reality within which they sat.
The opening lines of Far stayed with me for the entire novel, they foreshadow the dénouement, a future turning point, that could even be the beginning of a follow up novel. For me it was a delightfully transgressive ending that I wasn’t even looking for, it arrived abruptly, though more regular readers of noir fiction might have seen it coming.
That night, he had no idea he was walking over a cemetery. A secret cemetery with no gravestones or crosses, and only two dead bodies. There would be three by the time he left.
The lyrical prose is clever, compelling and nothing is lost in translation.
The Lost and Fallen
We meet two unnamed characters, the first is the man we meet walking across that unconsecrated ground. He has just walked out of his office, his job, his life and is looking for a temporary refuge, when he remembers this place, this lost dream of many that one of his colleagues bought into. He needs to stay in hiding and at first is vigilant in keeping away from others, but the forced isolation and the desolate nature of the place loosen his discipline and he makes a friend in an older widower, Matias.
The second character is a woman living in one of the villas alone. Experiencing a double abandonment, she is sticking it out, she works from home and writes the minutes of the resident’s association meetings. Since the realisation that the development had truly been abandoned, the association had turned its focus onto other items.
Hegemons Harmony Hampered
Then, given the inhospitable environment, efforts became focused on the interior, on the decor of the apartments and villas. And on the “dignification” of the settlement. Swept pavements, manicured gardens. Being dressed properly in the street. “So, no more going out in your dressing gown to buy bread,” said Sergio Morales, the chairman of the residents’ association, at one of their meetings, in that jocular tone which often masks inconvenient or ridiculous orders.
In this place that promised a kind of utopia, those that bought into it begin to realise that they have become neighbours with the marginalised, as the unfinished houses become occupied by people in equally difficult, but entirely different circumstances and they don’t like it. They begin to obsess over it, becoming paranoid, arguing about whether to call the police or take care of things themselves.
The destruction of their fantasy, the deterioration of an imagined life, of people’s mental states and even their physical states, emulates the disintegration of the country’s economic situation, that contributed to the depth of suffering inflicted on the population, as millions of jobs were lost and opportunities for youth disappeared, creating a surge in racism and xenophobia.
Light Always Illuminates
And there, amid the chaos, insecurity and fear, unlikely friendships and connections develop, between the man and the widower on the unfinished side of the settlement, the woman from the deteriorating utopia on the other side and the Dominican who doesn’t ask questions, working at the petrol station.
Brilliantly told, infused with sardonic humour, it is a disturbing yet revelatory tale of what happens when severe change arrives unbidden and the effect it has on the ‘haves,’ the ‘have-nots’ and those that fall through the cracks in between.
Rosa Ribas was born in El Prat de Llobregat in 1963. She has a degree in Hispanic Philology from the University of Barcelona, and spent time in Frankfurt at the Goethe University and the Instituto Cervantes. She now lives and works in Barcelona again and the city plays a big role in her writing.
Rosa is widely considered one of the queens of Spanish noir, achieving critical and commercial success in Spain with her Dark Years Trilogy (Siruela) and her Hernández trilogy (Tusquets). Far is her first foray away from crime fiction, into a more menacing social commentary. It is her first book to be translated into English.
Translator, Charlotte Coombe
Charlotte Coombe translates works from French and Spanish into English. She was shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize 2023 for her co-translation of December Breeze by Marvel Moreno. In 2022 she won the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for her translation of Antonio Diaz Oliva’s short story ‘Mrs Gonçalvesand theLives of Others’, and she was shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize 2019 for her translation of Fish Soup by Margarita García Robayo.
Today the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction longlist 2025 was announced.
16 books ranging in matter, style and genre, from agenda-setting reportage on contemporary issues alongside revisionist histories and myth-busting biographies; to memoirs of self-determination and intimate narratives that shine a light on ordinary people combine with real-life criminal cases, notorious and forgotten, whilst others defy genre-classification, weaving multiple disciplines into a compelling narrative work.
The authors nominated are from a range of professional areas and expertise, including a music icon, human rights lawyer, political adviser, marine biologist, NHS palliative care doctor and Pulitzer Prize winner.
What the Judges Said
What unites these diverse titles, that boast so many different disciplines and genres, is the accomplishment of the writing, the originality of the storytelling and the incisiveness of the research. Here are books that provoke debate and discussion, that offer insight into new experiences and perspectives, and that bring overlooked stories back to life and recognition. Amongst this stellar list, there are also reads that expertly steer us through the most pressing issues of our time, show the resilience of the human spirit, alongside others that elucidate the dangers of unchecked power, the consequence of oppression and the need for action and defiance.
Kavita Puri, Chair of Judges
The Longlist of 16 titles
Click on any title to read the longer description of the book on the Women’s Prize website.
Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (History) by Eleanor Barraclough (UK) – described as an accessible gateway into this period of time, it has great storytelling, it is told with extreme authority and very readable.
The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (History) by Helen Castor (UK) – this book is a timely study of political power focused on Kings Richard II and Henry IV who are vividly brought to life in astonishing detail. Not just a personal history but a glimpse into different music and performance.
A Thousand Threads (Memoir) by Neneh Cherry – (Sweden/Sierra Leone) – a unique portrait of a life lifved fully creatively.
The Story of a Heart (Medical Memoir) by Rachel Clarke (UK) – it tells how one family, in the midst of their grief gives the heart of their child so that another human being can survive. It is written with such compassion, it is storytelling at its best.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (UK) – a charming and beguiling book that captures the unusual relationship between the author and the leveret (baby hare) that she rescues.
Ootlin (Memoir) by Jenni Fagan (UK) – moving, enlightening and at times harrowing, a read about growing up in a broke, UK care system, a memoir written like poetry.
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Biography/Art History) by Sue Prideaux ( UK/Norway) – this deep dives into a phenomenal and artistic career, the pages come alive with colour and magic, with incredible storytelling.
What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean (science/climate/environment) by Helen Scales (UK) – a widely researched, deeply resonant account of our threatened oceans, which strikes a helpful balance between hope and pragmatism.
The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place (true crime/history) by Kate Summerscale (UK) – this is how history should be written, it is evocative, carefully researched and hard to put down.
Tracker (collective memoir/biography/oral history) by Alexis Wright (Australia) – explores new ways to write biography, challenging the expectations of form, whilst giving a unique glimpse into the life of someone from the stolen generation in Australia.
Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China (history/biography/feminism) by Yuan Yang (China/UK) – a powerful and intimate portrait of life in modern China told through the stories of four young women.
Have You Read Any of These?
Let us know in the comments if you have any of these titles or if there are any that you are particularly looking forward to reading.
I haven’t read any, but I enjoyed Kate Summerscales’sThe Suspicions of Mr Whicher, another true crime tale and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, so I’m sure her book will be an interesting read.
I like the sound of Private Revolutions, something new, to be delving into the modern lives of young women in today’s China and I can’t help but be interested in Agent Zo, the story of another woman in the resistance, after reading the excellent Madame Fourcade’s Secret War in 2024.
I read Buchi Emecheta’sJoys of Motherhood (1979) in 2019, it is such a great novel, one of my all time favorites, not yet reviewed here. I have been looking forward to reading more of her work since then, I picked up Second-class Citizen (1974) knowing it was likely to be equally good. She is known for her themes confronting girls and women, of motherhood, female independence and freedom through education.
A Girl Determined to Realise a Dream
Adah is a fabulous, determined character, a girl who when her father dies, her mother is inherited by his brother. Like many girl-orphans (fatherless), Adah was sent to live with her mother’s elder brother to work as a servant; any money her father left would be used for her brother Boy’s education.
Even if she was sent to school, it was very doubtful whether it would be wise to let her stay long. ‘A year or two would do, as long as she can write her name and count. Then she will learn how to sew.’ Adah had heard her mother say this many many times to her friends.
Determined to get an education herself, having already been punished for taking herself off to school without permission, the family decide to let her go, not for her own benefit, but because they recognise how it might benefit themselves. If Adah gets more schooling, the dowry that her future husband will have to pay them will be even bigger.
Adah wants more than just school, she wants a higher education, however she does not have the money to pay for the entry examination, let alone the other costs.
She was aware that nobody was interested in her since Pa died. Even if she had failed, she would have accepted it as one of the hurdles of life. But she did not fail. She not only passed the entrance examination, but she got a scholarship with full board.
My Struggles Become My Strength
The combination of hard work for the household and an education made Adah strongly responsible for herself and strategic in ensuring she stayed in education and succeeded enough to get a scholarship with full board. But to go even further with her studies, she needed a home, she would need to marry.
Her plan is to get to the UK but now she has a husband and in-laws and her good job not only supports them all, but makes many dependant on her and less inclined to be independent.
A New Motivation, I Do This Not Just for Myself
1960’s England is not what she expects, the challenges are even greater because now she has a woman’s body whose reproductive rights are not under her control and a partner who is no longer how he was in their home country, he seems invested in keeping her from shining.
He lifted his hand as if to slap her, but thought better of it. There would be plenty of time for that, if Adah was going to start telling him what to do. This scared Adah a little. He would not have dreamt of hitting her at home because his mother and father would not have allowed it. To them, Adah was like the goose that laid the golden eggs. It seemed that in England, Francis didn’t care whether she laid the golden egg or not. He was free at last from his parents, he was free to do what he liked, and not even hundreds of Adahs were going to curtail that new freedom. The ugly glare he gave Adah made that clear.
However, taking responsibility is what she knows best, she is determined to provide for her growing family and negotiate the mounting injustices she faces, in pursuit of achieving her dreams and caring for her children.
She was going to live, to survive, to exist through it all. Some day, help would come from somewhere.She had been groping for that help as if she were in the dark. Some day her fingers would touch something solid that would help her pull herself out. She was becoming aware of that Presence again – the Presence that had directed her through childhood. She went nearer to It in her prayers.
An inspirational story of the girl that never gives up, written by the woman who lived much of that experience, raising her own five children on her own in a foreign country and becoming a successful author.
Total inspiration and still relevant today. Highly recommended.
Buchi Emecheta OBE (1944 – 2017) was born in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to London with her student husband when she was eighteen. After her marriage broke up at the age of twenty-two, and while raising five children, she began writing and also obtained a degree in sociology from London University.
As well as writing numerous novels, she wrote plays for television and radio, and worked as a librarian, teacher, youth worker and sociologist, and community worker. She was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. Following her success as an author, Emecheta travelled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer.
She published over 20 books, including In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979).
Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education won her considerable critical acclaim. Emecheta once described her stories as “stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.”
In 2024 I was recommended a book by a family member, who went to an event and heard the author tell the story of his childhood and this novel he wrote called Boy Swallows Universe. Barely a week after this conversation, a friend arrived in my hometown of Aix en Provence, from Australia, pressed this book into my hands and said “You have GOT to read this!”.
Yes, you guessed right, it was Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton and I reviewed it here.
That book was published in 2018. I then saw there was another book about to be published called Lola in the Mirror, which some reviewers described as being even better than the debut novel. On reading about the inspiration for the novel, I decided to get a copy.
Love Stories and a Typewriter
Trent Dalton spent 17 years writing social affairs journalism across Australia. He had his own troubled childhood and upbringing, but he also witnessed and wrote about the situations of so many others, driven by the question; how was it that 120,000 people slept rough every night in one of the brightest, most fortunate countries in the world?
It is this question and the stories shared by the many people he has met over those years, that inspired him to create this latest story Lola in the Mirror.
Frank and Heartfelt
One of the people he was inspired by and wrote about, was Kathleen Kelly, the mother of a friend of his, who passed away on Christmas Day 2020. His book Love Stories is dedicated to her and prefaced with a letter written to her, typed on the sky blue Studio 44 Olivetti typewriter she bequeathed him.
In a letter to Kath, he writes of her memorial service:
Greg spoke of you and your beloved Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter, the sky-blue one that you’d been tapping on since the early 1970’s, writing fiery letters about woman’s rights and human rights and doing life right to politicians and principals and popes. He spoke about the letter you wrote to the Catholic Leader in 1970, railing against Canon Law demanding the covering of women’s heads in church. You were furious and brilliant.
After the service, Greg tells Trent that his Mum cut out all the stories he wrote and made scrapbooks that documented her life and all that was important to her and that she wanted him to have her typewriter. Being the honour that it was, Dalton wanted to do something special with it, to write something filled with love and depth and truth and frankness and heart because that’s how Kath was.
I told Greg I wanted to walk through the streets of Brisbane’s CBD (central business district) for two months asking random strangers to tell me love stories. I told him I then wanted to sit two for weeks straight with the Olivetti on the corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, on the edge of King George Square, and ask random strangers to stop and tell me more love stories, and then I wanted to write about all those love stories on your beautiful Olivetti.
Those two months of listening to people tell their stories of love, loss and belonging were research for this story of Lola, frank, fearless and full of heart.
Lola in the Mirror
Lola in the Mirror is a riveting, page turning novel that gripped me from the opening pages and never let go. It is a whirlwind of risk and adventure, an exploration of friendship, loss, perseverance and the resilience of the human spirit to not give up on a dream. It is a challenging coming-of-age story of an innocent girl who desperately wants to know who she is and rise above her situation.
The novel opens with a black and white illustration entitled ‘Escaping the Tyrannosaurus Waltz‘, the dance of mothers and their monsters, or the dark shadow of domestic violence, something Dalton recalled about his own mother, who often had to choose between homelessness or ‘the monster’, a terrible choice faced by many women in Australia, for whom domestic and family violence is one of the leading causes of homelessness.
The artist is a 16-year-old girl, she and her mother are on the run, they have been for all her life. The girl does not know her own name, because it’s too dangerous, but her mother promises to reveal things to her soon, when she turns 18, because then she will be free to make her own choices.
Houseless not homeless
The girl does not describe herself as homeless, the two live in a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the banks of the Brisbane River. There is a community of friends who live in similar circumstances, who look out for each other and this girl has a dream of a future life that will be different to how she lives now. For now that scrapyard home is her sanctuary, where she can dream up the best version of herself.
For a start, I ain’t homeless, I’m just houseless. Those two things are about as different as resting your head on a silk pillowcase and resting your head on a brick.
As this girl navigates her life in search of who she is, she comes across a mirror that she takes home, and after a period when the mirror cracks, something magical happens, half the mirror shows her legs and the other shows a dressed up woman in different world cities, who converses with her.
She wants to see her face, but she always has her back to her. She calls her Lola. Lola’s presence keeps her curious, keeps her coming back and looking in the mirror, gives her reason to keep dreaming. She is like a pulse on her mood, on her self-belief.
“Mirror, mirror, on the grass, what’s my future? What’s my past? … Mirror, mirror, please don’t lie. Tell me who you are. Tell me, who am I?”
The storytelling is incredible, the characters are fully formed, and the depiction of the city, the river, the bridges is visionary. You cannot read this book and not care about what happens to this girl or get hooked into wanting to know how she gets in and out of various situations. It is mystery, adventure, crime, psychological suspense and love story rolled into one. The best kind of holiday read ever.
I took this book on holiday with me to Australia, figuring I would read it there and leave it behind. It is set in Brisbane which is where I flew into, although I was staying much further South. On the day I started reading, my son was due to fly back to France. I sat in the passenger seat of the car as we drove to the airport. This time, we took a different route and suddenly we were driving alongside the CBD and there were all these bridges and a glimpse of Victoria Park and the mighty river.
When I got back to my book later in the day, on page 45, I read descriptions of exactly the same places we had just driven past. It was surreal, to move from the imagined place to these live flashes of what I had just seen. It brought the story to life and for the rest of the novel, those images kept recurring. I have always been a fan of reading works set in the places I travel to, and I’m glad I read this one in situ as well.
The Artwork
Throughout the novel are a number of superb illustrations, which both tell parts of the story and also suggest a future life of the girl artist. Each drawing is followed by an imagined art critic review in a black box, as if it were being displayed at an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the commentary describing what the artist is representing in the illustration.
Of course, I became curious about the actual artwork and skipped to the back of the book to look up the story behind it. It’s a good one.
Trent Dalton, Author
Trent Dalton is a two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist and the international bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies, and Lola in the Mirror. His books have sold over 1.3 million copies in Australia alone. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and two daughters.
Lola in the Mirror is for anyone who ever felt like they were going to collapse under the weight of sorrow. The book is also for all those beautiful souls who help us carry that weight. It’s an art story. It’s a crime story. It’s a mystery novel. And it’s a life story. I hope people will read this, get to the end and realise why I wrote Love Stories and sat on a Brisbane street corner watching people and asking them about love, loss and belonging for three months.
A meandering story-line, spanning 3 years, the introspective excavating of a young British-Ghanaian man’s soul and the situations he will encounter and confront, as he matures and grows into a version of himself that he likes.
I highlighted SO many passages.
Moments of Bliss, Small Worlds
Small worlds describes the way Stephen has learned to see things. It is his way of identifying and capturing certain moments, especially the loving, the poignant, the fleeting, the good.
A coming-of-age story set mostly in Peckham, London, it follows Stephen as he navigates the period in his life when he is separating from friends and his parents, from all that he knows. Simultaneously, he is moving from letting things happen to him and suffering, towards sitting with what is, reflecting, rejecting, embracing, understanding. A journey the evolves over three years.
Introspective and sensitive, music plays a large role in his mood, his management of his emotions, his friendships and the collective memory of Ghana, a country he is connected to but did not grow up in, a place that separates him from his family as much as it is a part of them all.
The novel is set over three years, written in three parts, like a jazz trio of piano, bass and drummer.
Part One – Two Young People in the Summertime (2010)
The summer after Stephen and all his friends have finished school and they are deciding what comes next. Stephen and his long-known friend Del are both applying to study music. This summer they start to look at each in a different way, to feel something, they are light-footed, beach going, feeling like something good is coming.
When Stephen’s path changes course, he deals with isolation and separation, unable to even find solace in his instrument, the trumpet, or music. His emotions run deep and he withdraws from them.
Part Two – A Brief Intimacy (2011)
Stephen is working with his friend Nam, training to become a chef. The owner Femi has split allegiances, a Ghanaian mother and Nigerian father mean they serve Ghanaian food and play Nigerian music, and they all know about the 1983 Nigerian Presidential executive order, the mandate of Ghana Must Go that affected an estimated 2 million people living in the country.
Rhythm returns to his life and he feels it everywhere. The observations of bits of daily life, poetic, vibrant, rhythmic and upbeat.
Back in Peckham, it’s here too, this rhythm happening everywhere, as I take my time to wander home: in the dash of four boys dressed in black, trying to beat the bus round the curve, soft socks in sliders slapping the ground. The song of a passing car, distant bass finding a home in my ears, the low, slow rumble calling attention the way thunder might ask you to check the sky for rain. The haggling taking place at the butcher’s and the grocer’s, the disbelief that it’s now three plantain for a pound, not four. In the sadness as I pass the spot where Auntie Yaa’s shop used to be, where she would make sure everyone was looked after. In the joyful surprise when I run into Uncle T, his mouth full of gold like its own sunshine. The couple I pass in the park, holding each other close, her head turned away from his, a smile on his face even as he pleads with her, babe, I didn’t mean it. In the distance she holds him, to see if he’ll come closer, because sometimes it’s not enough to say it, you have to show it too. In the conviction I share with many that this stretch, from Rye Lane to Commercial Way, is where our small world begins and ends. There’s rhythm happening, everywhere; all of us like instruments, making our own music.
But expectations, old trauma and shame linger and until they can be addressed, they undermine relationships, cause rupture, rigidity and regret. So much still to recognise, dismantle, overcome and heal. And Stephen explores it all.
I’m slowly taking myself apart, so I might build myself up once more. And as part of this undoing, I want to ask him, why?And then there are those aspects of the outside world, not so far away, that seethe with unresolved anger and hatred, that threaten to close in on them. A raising of public consciousness and a shift in perception.
Stephen takes time off after the turn of events and pays a visit to Ghana. His trip heralds a reckoning.
Still, of late I’ve felt the urge for more. I’ve always had a decent grasp on who I am, or where I might find myself, but I’ve never really known where I’ve come from. This trip has started a shift. There are gaps which my father might fill, with his own story. I want him to tell me who he is, or who he was. I want to know who he was when he was twenty. I want to know what he dreams of, where he finds freedom.
Melody, discord, harmony and triumph – a story through music
As we read, there are songs Stephen chooses to accompany him. Often as I read, I stop to listen and look up the artist, reminding me of the enjoyment I had reading Bernice McFadden’sThe Book of Harlan (reviewed here). It can add so much more to the experience, when music with a cultural influence is present, calibrating the reader’s imagination with the mood of the story.
The way the story comes full circle, when by the end, Stephen’s father accepts his son’s invitation to come with him, to share a meal, to listen to ‘Abrentsie’ by Gyedu-Blay Ambrolley, the book morphed into scenes of a wonderful film that I was simultaneously watching and reading. I wished I weren’t on the last pages, because it felt so good to witness the transmutation of emotion into a new way forward, that was something like the old, but different; accepted, something they will be able to nourish and grow from.
Caleb Azumah Nelson is a British-Ghanaian writer and photographer living in south-east London.
His first novel, Open Water, won the Costa First Novel Award, Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, and was a number-one Times bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Waterstones Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Desmond Elliott Prize. He was selected as a National Book Foundation ‘5 under 35’ honoree by Brit Bennett.
Small Worlds, his second novel won the Dylan Thomas Prize (2024) (a prize that celebrates exceptional literary talent aged 39 or under), cementing the 30-year-old British-Ghanaian author as a rising star in literary fiction. The judges had this to say:
“Amid a hugely impressive shortlist that showcased a breadth of genres and exciting new voices, we were unanimous in our praise for this viscerally moving, heartfelt novel. There is a musicality to Caleb Azumah Nelson’s writing, in a book equally designed to be read quietly and listened aloud. Images and ideas recur to beautiful effect, lending the symphonic nature of Small Worlds an anthemic quality, where the reader feels swept away by deeply realised characters as they traverse between Ghana and South London, trying to find some semblance of a home. Emotionally challenging yet exceptionally healing, Small Worlds feels like a balm: honest as it is about the riches and the immense difficulties of living away from your culture.”
I found this beautiful hard copy of Irish author John Boyne’s short novel Water in a second hand bookstore on holiday recently. I had put too many books in my suitcase already so I shouldn’t have been buying more, but this was too tempting, especially as water was one of the great themes of my holiday.
I did leave most of the books I took with me behind, but Water was my in-flight read on my return, and a good choice as it is not too long or complicated.
The only issue I have, is that it is part of a series of four short novels, interconnected stories. Now I want to know what will happen next and I don’t have Earth or Fire on my shelves yet. Air is due to be published in May 2025.
On verra, as we say here in France. We will see.
Irish Island Stories
Water is another Irish Island story, I realise I have read a few of these kind of stories in recent times, where a character either lives on an island or goes off to spend time on an island for some reason.
In 2024, I read Hagstone by Sinead Gleeson about an artist Nell, who lives on a wild and rugged island that is also inhabited by a commune of women trying to live outside society and I also read Sophie White’s literary horror Where I End, again set on an Irish island, with a strange cast of characters with their terrible secrets. I see another one coming in 2025, June O’Sullivan’s historical fiction set in 1867, The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife set on the extremely isolated island of Skellig Michael off the coast of Kerry.
In a sense all Irish literature is island literature, but there is something particular about setting stories on small islands with their slightly insular communities that magnify the issues the story is trying to project.
Not an island, a continent. A few favourite water pictures from my recent holiday.
Change a Name, Change a Life
When Vanessa Carvin arrives on the island, she changes her name to Willow and shaves her hair. Content to learn that the cottage she rented had no Wi-Fi or television, we understand she is someone that might be recognised and that is the last thing she wants. We do not know why, the past will be slowly revealed over the course of the novel.
When a cat saunters in and makes itself at home, she thinks of her elder daughter Rebecca and husband Brendan, though what happened to separate her from them remains a mystery.
Well, he’s surrounded by chaos now, I tell myself, wondering whether I should smile at the irony but being unable to. Although he’s technically not my ex-husband at all yet. I just think of him that way. One day, I will summon the energy to speak to a solicitor but, right now, I have had enough of the legal system to last me a lifetime, and who knows, maybe he’ll die, or be killed; which would save me both the bother and the expense.
Contemplation and Conversations
Though she has come to the island to get away, she does interact with the locals and news of her arrival travels quickly. She develops a routine and keeps checking to see if her daughter has read her messages. For some reason her elder daughter isn’t speaking to her and early on we learn that the younger daughter Emma has died.
The way the novel holds much back from the reader while we follow Willow around, in a way reflects the characters own blindness and denial around what has occurred to her family. The island becomes a refuge or escape from reality while the new name and change in appearance physical appearance create a mask behind which she has time to contemplate the events that have occurred and her own complicity.
I was never what you might call a natural mother, but I loved my daughters and did everything I could to ensure that they enjoyed a happy and secure childhood. My own had been untroubled and , having come through it without any noticeable scars, I simply emulated my own mother’s behaviour. Businesslike and efficient, without being overly sugary.
Despite this, none of the family are now together and a scandal has rocked the illusion of her foundation. Although she is there to reflect on the situation and her own role in it, she quickly finds her own form of escapism with her neighbour’s son. The conversations she has with various island inhabitants inform us on the state of the Irish psyche and proclivities, it’s own form of blindness and denial.
Her conversation with the island priest on observing a young man seeking confession is revealing:
‘When I was his age, we all had to go,’ I tell him. ‘It would have been unheard of not to. And I brought my own children too, even though I’m not a believer. So I suppose that makes me just as big a hypocrite.’
‘But something must have made you bring them,’ he insists. ‘Perhaps some part of you was hoping to receive the Spirit, even if you didn’t realise it?’
‘I brought them to keep my husband happy,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t know how much you know about Irish women, Ifechi, but that’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing for centuries now, and look where it’s got us.’
‘And where is that?’
‘Here. To some godforsaken island in the Atlantic Ocean, where we know no one and no one knows us.’
Complex and Conflicting Truths
John Boyne adeptly walks his character through her isolation and interactions, penetrating the dark, hidden aspects of outwardly normalised lives that are so far from it, they are no longer able to see the signs of damaging dysfunction.
Symbolically, water represents depth, the ebb and flow of life, the things we should know, that sometimes we only come to know in the stillness of being. Water can cure, purify, cleanse and provide insight. Leaving the city behind, crossing the water to an island, Willow will plunge the depths to awaken to her own role in her not seeing.
It is interesting that the author chose to inhabit the character of a woman, that adds to the theme of blindness or unknowing in the novel. That element of not seeing what is happening, and the usual repression of the feminine within the masculine.
Here an author steps into those shoes and we go there with him to see what it feels like from the inside and witness the progress that can be made by making time to sit with situations that require contemplation, resolution and healing.
Highly Recommended.
Have you read any of the novels in John Boyne’sElement series?
Recently I wrote about Sophie Fontanel’sCouver un Astre (reviewed here), a poignant reflection on the large balloon that was installed in Le Jardin des Tuileries during the Paris Olympics and Para-Olympics of summer 2024.
Her book describes the effect this installation on herself and the community around her, how its ascent sixty metres into the sky each evening, did something to uplift those who witnessed it, every night.
Back in September 2024, the idea was floated that the city of Paris wished that the installation could be kept in the public gardens after the Olympic Games, an idea that posed a series of technical, financial and heritage problems.
Everybody loves a balloon
The enthusiasm and wonder the balloon generated was quite unexpected by the city and the designer. Very few tickets were available to approach the balloon up close, something Sophie Fontanel ponders in her book.
Yesterday it was announced that this magnificent design by Mathieu Lehanneur will be reinstalled in the Tuileries Gardens, the public space that separates the pyramid of the Louvre, the place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées, for the next three summers until 2028.
So if you didn’t get to see this wonder last summer, from afar or up close, there will be another three summers of opportunity to witness something of what Sophie Fontanel writes about.
An executive order of a different kind
After a joint announcement was made by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo and the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, he posted this message on social media.
“Elle reviendra chaque étè. De la Fête de la musique [21 juin] à la Fête du sport, jusqu’aux Jeux de Los Angeles”
“It will return each summer. From the Music festival to the Sport festival, until the Los Angeles Games.”
In a similar spirit to the Fête de la musique, after the games of 2024, the annual Fête du sport was created. Every year on September 14, sport demonstrations and competitions are held to increase awareness and improve participation in different sports.
It is good to know that those difficulties were somehow overcome, and in a relatively short period of time, in order for the balloon to be ready for the summer of 2025.
The balloon will be accessible to the public from 10am until 7pm every day, and will again rise with the sunset into the Paris sky in the evenings.
Maybe now someone might translate this gem of a book into English, since the wonder of this uplifting balloon is going to be around for a few more summers.
Anyone planning to visit Paris in the next three years?
Word by Word 