Fiction

Novels, Short stories

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Ghost Wall (2018) by Sarah Moss

In 2020 I read the novel Summerwater by Sarah Moss after having listened to the author speak about her work. I didn’t review it because it didn’t work that well for me, but when I saw this slim novella at a book sale I thought I’d try again. It had been longlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2019.

Family Memory or Normalising Terror

Book cover of novella Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. The cover shows woven wood that might have been used to recreate an Iron Age hut.

Interestingly, Summerwater was an ‘on-holiday’ novel, a rain soaked 24 hours in the Scottish Highlands, of families stuck in their cabins, inspired by the author’s two week stay under similar conditions, while Ghost Wall is also a tale of a less than salubrious summer holiday.

Teenage Silevia is spending time with her family in an Iron Age re-enactment hut in Northumberland, experiencing what it might have been like to live as they did. There is a Professor and his students also present, whereas Silvie and her father are there because her father, a bus-driver is passionate to the point of obsession about the history of this period.

We were sleeping in the roundhouse, my parents and I. The students had built it earlier in the year, as part of a course on ‘experiential archaeology’, but they had been firmly resistant to my father’s view that everyone should sleep in it together.

The point of the experience was to have a flavour of Iron Age life, a period around 800 BC when people learned how to use iron, which subsequently shifted the way they lived. Still very basic, so much of the holiday is spent foraging for food and for Silvie’s mother, preparing it.

Re-enactment not Reality

Silvie befriends one of the students Molly, who isn’t taking the experience as seriously as the others, who brings a reminder that life is not like this today and challenges some of the things that they do. Silvie admires her rebellious spirit, but is too fearful of her coercive father to defy his requests, finding it impossible to say no and seeing how little it takes for her mother to be punished.

I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend out fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone.

Photo by E. Laperriere Pexels.com

Underlying her experience and in the opening three pages, is the experience of the bog girl who was sacrificed, a story that as we read those pages, it is not clear whether this is a foreshadowing of something that is going to occur, or something from the past that she can imagine and feel, but whatever it is, it starts to feel real, even when she says otherwise.

Silvie, she said, you’re really OK with this, the ghost wall? It’s interesting, I said, I didn’t think it would be but it is. You’re not scared she said. I shrugged. Of what, bones? Of people, she said.

Passion or Persuasion

Photo by Petra Nesti on Pexels.com

The novella is atmospheric and becomes increasingly alarming as Silvie gets swept up in the passion of her father and the history professor, who have convinced themselves that there’s nothing wrong with taking the way these people used to live further. Despite her unwillingness, Sylvie also recognises her father isn’t academic like the rest of the team and part of her wants to support him.

It’s slightly terrifying the further things goes and the ending might have been a little abrupt, but then often conclusions are dramatic when an intervention is required, rather than the ideal of thoughtfully addressing real concerns.

Interviewed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, Sarah Moss, on her inspiration for the novel shared:

I had a writing residency for the Hexham Book Festival, and became fascinated by Hadrian’s Wall and prehistoric arts and crafts. We think of Hadrian’s Wall as the boundary between England and Scotland but neither of those entities existed then; it was the boundary between the Roman empire and the barbarians. There was and is plenty of reason to be thinking about the borders between civilisation and barbarity, nature and culture, insiders and outsiders.

Further Reading

A Q & A with Sarah Moss: On Iron Age re-enactment camps, barbarity and civilisation and Brexit’s impact on writers

Guardian: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss review – back to the iron age

Author, Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss has published eight novels, two memoirs, numerous essays, and academic work on Romanticism, travel, food and gender. Her work has been listed for prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Wellcome Prize.

Her novels are Summerwater, Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children, The Tidal Zone, Ghost Wall and Ripeness (2025). A memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and another My Good Bright Wolf (2025) is about growing up in the 1970’s and how excess self-control affects her early adulthood.

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Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri

I haven’t read a Ben Okri novel for a long time. He is well known for his third novel, the 1991 Booker Prize winning The Famished Road, the story of Azaro, a spirit child around the time of Nigerian independence; a challenging novel to read as it slips in and out of reality, and one the writer recalls being spooked by, as those spirits he wrote about crashed into his dreams.

There were times, writing at night, when the story I was telling would spook me. Those where nights when I feared for my sanity. I couldn’t shake the feeling that when people read the novel they’d think something was wrong with me. It must have taken a species of madness to write The Famished Road. It certainly took a stronger psyche than I realised I had to work on that taboo-breaking material, and to withstand the horrors involved. Writing about the spirit world at night, for a long period, is dangerous if you come from a land that believes in them. Spirit children, born several times to the same mother, have a special mythology about them, part dread, part magic.

Booker Prize Winner 1991 for The Famished Road Ben Okri Madame Sosostris homage to T.S. Eliot The Waste Land she can be perceived as the central consciousness of the tale

There is something alluring about Ben Okri’s work, the way he seeks to portray a cultural inner authenticity that embraces the ordinary, the mythical, the poetic and the mysterious. It can feel slightly beyond reach, and then there are moments of universal resonance. A wonderful, considered author, who embraces all literature and forms.

For some time I had known that there is no objective reality that is true for everyone. There is only the reality perceived through culture, traditions, education, consciousness. We don’t see what is there. We see what we are taught to see. Our reality is a product of culture and consciousness. 

After the challenge of The Famished Road, I remember picking up the slimmer Astonishing the Gods, a beautiful fable-like story about being invisible and having the courage to go forth anyway; a man finds himself among invisible beings who live by one principle ‘to repeat or suffer every incident until we experience it properly or fully’ – the sort of book that was ideal to read in youth, one I loved for its magical element and transformative power when I read it in my 20’s.

Madame So So Sad, Sorceress or Alter Ego

ASo where does Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted fit? More along the lines of Astonishing the Gods for sure, with a nod in homage to T.S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) character in his epic poem The Waste Land, who may be perceived as this tale’s central consciousness. She comes from the first phase of that poem ‘The Burial of the Dead’, with its themes of sorrow and disappointment, of April and the cruelty in the coming of Spring. Eliot too, is said to have been referencing a character from Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. 

The Novel

Okri’s Madame Sosostris is a modern fable, with a touch of cynisism and humour, it is about two upper-class power couples, one of the women has the idea to create a festival for those who have suffered loss but are never acknowledged, the brokenhearted. It has been 20 years since her own major heartbreak.

A Touch of Theatre

Much of this novella length story is dialogue and I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching a play, even the voices seemed louder as if projected out to an audience more so than to each other. We get the feeling that these people don’t much like each other and have long ago left their more authentic aspects of themselves behind.

We spend our lives trying to become ourselves. Few people ever succeed.

Photo by G. PITOIS Pexels.com

The festival will be a masked, costumed event, an idea they hope will allow people to reconnect with something more authentic, since no one will know who they are. This will prove strange to Viv, a member of the House of Lords, who is not used to being encountered by people who do not who she is or the position she holds in society.

But she soon realised that the things they were saying were genuine, that they wanted nothing from her, and had no idea who she was. This was disquieting and charming in equal measure. Disquieting because she was used to people reacting to her because of her money. She was used to the influence of her position in society, the power it gave her. Being liked without that power was new to her. But it did not alter her anxiety.

A Sacred Space in Nature to Unmask

A sacred forest in the south of France, Sainte Baume

It will be for one night only, abroad, in a sacred forest in the south of France. The special invitee is Madame Sosostris, whom they have come across once in the House of Lords (where one of the women works) who will do readings for each guest.

They had come to her weighed down with the dark burdens of their unendurable agonies. They left with a streak of light in their eyes. They were people who had chewed their innards and devoured their own hearts. They were locked in the narrow space of their beings. They were imprisoned for long periods of time in the hell of their own minds, turning over their agonies till they grew and filled their world. What most of them needed was a glimpse beyond themselves, a glimpse of something real, something with the texture of dry bone, the fragrance of a dead beetle, the roughness of a cement wall.

When plans go awry, it becomes necessary to adapt and step out of comfort zones. Some will rise to the occasion, others will be destabilised by it. Ultimately, the couples all experience moments of consciousness raising and are changed in some way by their encounter.

The novel explores identity and personality and how society reinforces these constructs which move further and further away from the authentic, creating a mirage masking the true self. It demonstrates how a shift in perspective and stepping outside oneself can be beneficial to the psyche.

It’s an entertaining read, that plays around with what is real, what is seen and unseen, thought provoking in a theatrical sense and ready for the stage in my humble opinion.

Further Reading/Listening

An Interview: Ben Okri – How The Famished Road was Written on a Magic Tide of Freedom

Listen To: Ben Okri Talking About T.S. ELiot and The Waste Land (16mins)

Guardian: Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri review – a slender fable

Ben Okri, Author

Sir Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria. His childhood was divided between Nigeria, where he saw first-hand the consequences of war, and London.

His writing has used magic realism to convey the social and political chaos in the country of his birth, however no two books are the same exploring themes of reality, unreality, society, storytelling, freedom, magic, consciousness, history, politics, justice.

His books include The Last Gift of the Master Artists (2022), The Freedom Artist (2019); the short story collection Prayer for the Living (2019); the prose-poetry hybrids Tales of Freedom (2009) and A Time for New Dreams (2011); the long poem Mental Fight (1999); the essay collection A Way of Being Free (1997); the poetry collection An African Elegy (1992); and the Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road (Anchor, 1991).

He has won many awards over the years, including the Booker Prize for Fiction and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright, and poet. In 2019 Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped the World. In June 2023 he was awarded a knighthood in the King’s official birthday honours.

Booker Prize 2025

The longlist for the Booker Prize 2025 will be announced on Tuesday, 29 July 2025. The shortlist of six books will be announced on 23 September and the winner will be announced on 10 November.

Have you read any Ben Okri books? Let us know in the comments below?

N.B. This book was an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

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This Is Happiness (2019) by Niall Williams

Irish literature portrait of a community Faha Kerry Novel Historical fiction

I decided to read Niall William’s This Is Happiness, when I saw that he had won the 2025 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award with his latest novel Time of the Child.

That was the novel I wanted to read, but when I learned that it was a story set in the village of Faha and that an earlier novel preceded it, I decided I would read them both. This is Happiness was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (2020). The prize that year was won by another Irish author Christine Dwyer Hickey for The Narrow Land, an exploration the marriage of artists Edward and Jo Hopper.

I was curious to see how it would be to read a Niall Williams novel today, remembering the utter pleasure of reading Four Letters of Love in London in 1997, the inaugural book of the first book club I ever joined.

Certain Past, Uncertain Future

I didn’t pay too much attention to this passage on page 3 when I read it, but now that I’ve finished and contemplating why I highlighted so many excellent passages and loved the storyline, somehow this didn’t grip me, I find a clue in this early revelation. When a story is told in the distant past, it brings with it for me, an element of negative nostalgia, because I know this is done, there is little possibility for transformation, it is missing the element of the great unknown, the limitless potential for things to be different.

I myself am seventy-eight years old and telling here of a time over six decades ago. I know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.

So we meet our protagonist Noel Crowe reflecting back to when he was 17 years old and had been sent to Faha, County Clare; initially we know not what for, just that something has happened in his life and it had been seen fit for him spend time living with his grandparents.

I had come down from Dublin on the train, not exactly in disgrace – my grandparents, Doady and Ganga were too contrary and crafty for that – but certainly distant from grace, if grace is the condition of living your time at ease on the earth.

Lifting of the Clouds, Coming of the Light

Photo by T. Bernard Pexels.com

The first thing that happens is that it stopped raining. And even though it initially went unnoticed, it became a non-event of significance in that spring of 1958. The second thing was that electricity was to be installed in the area for the first time since the villagers filled in forms a few years before.

Consider this: when the electricity did finally come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling…

In the week following the switch-on, Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, had a run on hand-, oval-round- and even full-length as people came in from out the country and brought looking glasses of all variety, wet home, and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.

This brought the arrival of the second main character, 60 year old lodger Christy, whom Noel would come to know.

I thought he must be travelling man, there were many at the time, not just the whitesmiths and pot-menders but people adrift in the country generally, for all the reasons known to man unmoored from family or home and making a kind of living from wares carried in cases and opened like miniature theatres to display whatever was newest in the larger world.

Love’s Beginning, Affection’s Endurance

Accompanying world-travelled Christy, Noel was intrigued by his subtle enquiries, indicating past connections in Faha.

I chose Ganga’s method for dealing with catastrophe and pretended nothing had happened. It wasn’t so easy. The scene not only stayed with me, it grew larger for not being spoken and proved perhaps the theorem of imaginary numbers by showing that imagination is many times the size of reality.

When he learns of that history and his intentions, Noel makes a judgement and can’t help himself from interfering, trying to hasten an outcome, until he too experiences the fickleness of youthful desire, the power and impenetrability of the class system and feelings of regret.

A Portrait of A Community in Changing Times

There’s much about this novel I really enjoyed, lots of great passages and the way it tells 17 year old Noe’s perspective and experience, as he spends time with his grandparents, alongside Christy, friend and elder, bringing light to most but not all of the village of Faha, while seeking to atone for past events.

Perhaps it was the slow pace of village life, but the dwelling and description, which often I love, slowed down the narrative and had me less inclined to pick it up.

It could be that I had unrealistic expectations, but also it feels less contemporary than other Irish lit I’ve been reading like Elaine Feeney’s Let Me Go Mad In My Way, where characters are beginning to confront that repressed traditional way of being, while this novel is narrated by a now aged man looking back to that time from the perspective of a younger and older man, where if carried a feeling of foregone conclusions. And knowing that a young person, I felt exactly the opposite to this quote below: the unlived and unknown life in front of me was precisely what made life bearable.

There was every reason to feel natural joy in the world, but for the one that makes it accessible. When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you’re young, the unlived life in front of you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.

Shortlist of Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2025 won by Niall Williams for Time of the Child Donal Ryan Joseph O'Connor Colm Toibin Christine Dwyer Hickey
Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Shortlist 2025

I do recommend it and having noted the book has a significant number of 5 star reviews, I’m clearly in the minority. I will be interested to see how I find The Time of the Child, but I need a break from Faha for the moment, so my next stop is a translated novel set in Mexico City and Aix-en-Provence!

Further Reading

New York Times review: Once Upon a Time In Ireland by Elizabeth Graver

“This Is Happiness” is as full of detours and backward glances as it is of forward motion and — as befits a novel narrated by an old man who comments that “as you get toward the end, you revisit the beginning” — is centrally preoccupied with time itself. NYT

Have you read a recent novel by Niall Williams? Let us know in the comments below.

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Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way (2025) by Elaine Feeney

Electra Sophles Anne Carson Annie Ernaux Shame Intergenerational inheritance Ireland

Back in 2023 Irish author Elaine Feeney’s novel How To Build a Boat (my review) was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. That was a bumper year for Irish novelists with four of them on the longlist and Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song winning the prize.

How to Build a Boat was a great read with interesting, memorable characters, about an oppressive school and a free spirit whose presence disturbed the controlling order and rigidity of the institution by making a boat inside the school walls.

When I saw she had another book out with a provocative title like this, I decided to dip in and see what it was about.

French and Greek Literary References, The Female Voice

winner nobel prize literature 2022 memory trauma

If the title isn’t a giveaway to reclaiming and redefining madness, a convenient label historically used to oppress women and have them incarcerated in the past, the epigram from Annie Ernaux’s novella Shame further reminds us of the often silenced, lived experience of women and girls, peeling back social shame, intergenerational violence and little recognised, inherited trauma that continues to reverberate and affect current behaviours and relationships.

This can be said about shame: those who experience it feel that anything can happen to them, that the shame will never cease and that it will only be followed by more shame. Annie Ernaux, Shame

A Story In a Title

The title of Feeney’s book is a powerful statement from the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles. The line appears in his play Electra, translated as: “I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.” In the play, the main character, overwhelmed by grief, injustice and familial violence, demands to grieve and rage on her own terms. It is a cry for the right to express and feel one’s own emotional suffering and pain, in the way it is desired, needed.

“Don’t tell me how to feel or how to react, let me experience my madness as I must.”

Elaine Feeney said in an interview that she encountered the phrase in Anne Carson’s translation of Electra and immediately felt its resonance, both personally and within her book’s themes.

Going Mad or Getting to Grips With the Past

irish literature contemporary fiction

Her novel is about an Irish woman named Claire O’Connor who had been living in London with her boyfriend Tom Morton, unravelling after the death of her mother. Unable to cope, she breaks up with Tom and returns to the West of Ireland, initially to care for her father.

Back living in the family home awakens memories and issues for Claire and her two brothers, who are more used to avoiding and ignoring past and present bad behaviours.

The unexpected arrival of Tom and new friends Claire makes at her new university job, create a situation that brings people together that wouldn’t ordinarily meet.

Choosing to Live Differently

This new dynamic challenges some of those repressed feelings and the characters will either continue to deny or choose to grow.

‘There’s land here, isn’t there?’ He was playing with me now. ‘They’re not making any more of it – I’ll bet they don’t teach you that inside in the universities.’

I wanted to say that none of us wanted his land, full of rock, thistles and furze bushes. That it was a noose. I wanted to say the land was never mine. I knew well enough to know that.

Generational Influence

The story is told in different timelines, in the first person present, when Claire is an adult and has returned to Ireland, in 2022 and then there are chapters about the family from 1920, events around the old abandoned house at the back their property.

The O’Connor’s were good tenant farmers and had then been given this small handsel of land, a slight acreage of a holding from the Estate in the Land Commission’s Exchange for compliance. They had, until this, been generations of shepherds. Mostly, too, they were emigrants. A compliant people who believed in God being good and work being eventually rewarded for all eternity.

1920 was a period when there was unsettling violence from the Black and Tan Forces in East Galway around the Irish War of Independence, cultivating an atmosphere of fear and violence and an era where there was little escape, and few and far opportunities. Though 100 years in the past, undercurrents of that violent era continue to pump through the veins of this family.

Then there is Claire’s childhood memory of a Hunt Day in 1990, when the Queen of England was looking for a black mare for the Household Cavalry. Flashes of memory bring it all back as Claire confronts the past in order to better create any chance she might have of a better future.

Great Storytelling and Thought Provoking Depth

It is a thought provoking novel rooted in personal, collective and inherited memory, that deals with ‘the home‘ as the institution that requires dismantling, and it is the coming together of family, friends and the new relationships in Claire’s life that will facilitate the change that can redefine what home can become.

It’s also a novel that is entertaining with or without the layers of meaning that come from the references, but it is one that I have enjoyed all the more for understanding more about the motivations of the author and the literary influences she has referenced and talks about in the following interview.

And speaking of the Booker Prize, the longlist for 2025 will be announced on Tuesday 29 July 2025. This year’s Chair of Judges is an author who has never been in a book club, Roddy Doyle, who is joined by Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid.

Further Reading or Listening

An Interview by Bad Apple, Aotearoa: Ash Davida Jane interviews Elaine Feeney

Listen to Elaine Feeney read an extract from her novel Met Me Go Mad In My Own Way

Elain Feeney, Author

Elaine Feeney is an acclaimed novelist and poet from the west of Ireland. Her debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. How to Build a Boat was also shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year.

Feeney has published the poetry collections Where’s Katie?, The Radio Was Gospel, Rise and All the Good Things You Deserve, and lectures at the University of Galway.

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Leila Aboulela awarded PEN Pinter Prize 2025

Freedom to Write, Freedom to Read

Leila Aboulela winner of English Pen Prize 2025

Leila Aboulela, the Sudanese author who now lives in Scotland has won the English PEN Award 2025, a prize established in homage to Harold Pinter, the British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor and the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature:

“who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”

Judges praised Aboulela, the author of six novels, for her ‘nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement’, calling her writing ‘a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration’.

The author responded:

‘I am honoured to win a prize established in memory of Harold Pinter, a great writer who continues to inspire so much loyalty and consistent high regard. For someone like me, a Muslim Sudanese immigrant who writes from a religious perspective probing the limits of secular tolerance, this recognition feels truly significant. It brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and whose stories get heard.’

One of the judges, novelist Nadifa Mohamed added:

‘Leila Aboulela is an important voice in literature, and in a career spanning more than three decades her work has had a unique place in examining the interior lives of migrants who chose to settle in Britain. In novels, short stories and radio plays she has navigated the global and local, the political with the spiritual, and the nostalgia for a past home with the concurrent curiosity and desire for survival in a new one. Aboulela’s work is marked by a commitment to make the lives and decisions of Muslim women central to her fiction, and to examine their struggles and pleasures with dignity. In a world seemingly on fire, and with immense suffering unmarked and little mourned in Sudan, Gaza, and beyond, her writing is a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration.’

The prize is awarded annually to writers resident in the UK, Ireland, the Commonwealth or the former Commonwealth. 

Former winners of the PEN Pinter Prize are Arundhati Roy (2024), Michael Rosen (2023), Malorie Blackman (2022), Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021), Linton Kwesi Johnson (2020), Lemn Sissay (2019), Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (2018), Michael Longley (2017), Margaret Atwood (2016), James Fenton (2015), Salman Rushdie (2014), Tom Stoppard (2013), Carol Ann Duffy (2012), David Hare (2011), Hanif Kureishi (2010) and Tony Harrison (2009).

Three Novels By Leila Aboulela I Recommend

Leila Aboulela Bird Summons
Caucasus Pricess Anna of Georgia kidnap
White Nile Blue Nile Khartoum Sudan conflict

Bird Summons (2019)

Bird Summons is an excellent novel about three Muslim immigrant women living in Scotland, from different countries, who set off on a short holiday in the Scottish Highlands, to pay homage to Lady Evelyn Murray Cobbold, the first British woman convert to Islam who performed Hajj, the spiritual pilgrimage to Mecca.

Taken further outside of their comfort zones, the trip is a kind of reckoning for each of the women, a little like a road trip novel, they are stuck with each other, their forced isolation in the Highlands brings out the best and worst in each other and will leave them each transformed by the experience.

The Kindness of Enemies (2015)

The Kindness of Enemies, is a dual narrative set in modern day Scotland and mid 1800’s Russia and the Caucasus. The contemporary character is Natasha Wilson (born to a Russian mother and Sudanese father, whose mother marries a Scot), a Scottish university lecturer whose research concerns the life of Caucasian Highlander, Shamil Imam.

The novel moves between the issues facing Natasha in her life, and the ancient conflict between Highlander mountain men lead by Shamil Imam as they resisted Tsarist Russia from expanding into their territory.

River Spirit (2023)

River Spirit is historical fiction set in 1890’s Sudan, at a turning point in the country’s history, as its population began to mount a challenge against the ruling Ottoman Empire, only the people were not united, due to the opposition leadership coming from a self-proclaimed “Mahdi” – a religious figure that many Muslims believe will appear at the end of time to spread justice and peace.

The novel tells the story of orphan siblings, Akuany and Bol, and their young merchant friend Yaseen, the friend of their father who made a promise to protect them, forever connecting them to his life. It is also a story of the Nile, of the White Nile and the Blue Nile, a symbol of twin selves, one free, one enslaved, of twin occupying forces, the Ottoman and British Empires and of the many aspects in the story where twin forces clash, mix and become something new.

Aboulela’s other novels are The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005), Lyrics Alley (2010) all three of which were longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (Orange Prize) and she has also published a short story collection Elsewhere, Home (2018).

Have you read any works by Leila Aboulela? Let us know in the comments below.

Photo by Gabriela Palai on Pexels.com

Further Reading

World Literature Today Interview: Writing as Spiritual Offering: A Conversation with Leila Aboulela by  Keija Parssinen

Guardian article: Leila Aboulela wins PEN Pinter prize for writing on migration and faith

JSTOR: Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction by Waïl S. Hassan

Leila Aboulela, Author

Leila Aboulela grew up in Khartoum and has been living in Aberdeen since 1990. She is the author of six novels among them River Spirit, The Translator, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Leila was the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her story collection, Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award.

Her books have been translated into fifteen languages, and she has also written numerous plays for BBC Radio. She is Honorary Professor of the WORD Centre at the University of Aberdeen and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize in 2022. It wasn’t on my radar, probably because it seemed to me like it was trying to be too many things, but when I saw a hardcover copy on sale at the annual Ansouis vide grenier last September, I decided to delve into it and see for myself.

Outstanding Sri Lankan Literature

sri lankan literature book cover light blue background with white streaks

I knew that it was about the civil war era in Sri Lanka and I have read some excellent novels that are set in those difficult times, most recently the novel that won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024 Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan (see my review here), but my favourite novel set in that country is Naomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (my review here), winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2013.

Munaweera writes exquisitely of the island of Sri Lanka, in lyrical prose that takes the reader inside the family experiences, evoking all the senses, the aroma of the cuisine, the fear and excitement of young, forbidden love, the pain of heartbreak, the palpable tension as sisters walk to school, sometimes witnessing images that will stain their minds and revisit their dreams for years.

Mystery, Satire, Historical Fiction and Magical Realism in One

Booker Prize Winner 2022 Sri Lankan literature magic realism afterlife noir

Seven Moons is a literary mystery about the life and death of Maali Almeida, who from the opening pages, in a second person narrative, turns up dead and from the In Between, that place between life and the afterlife that he now inhabits, proceeds to uncover the mystery of his death.

Set in 1990 Colombo, Maali was a war photographer, a promiscuous gay man, sometimes gambler and seeker of the next photograph that will show the dark and gruesome elements of those in power, a witness to crimes he believes can bring down governments, stop wars.

The In Between, Down Below and The Light

When he arrives at the In Between, he and others like him are told they have seven moons, seven nights to meet the criteria to enter The Light. As they queue and ask questions about their deaths, Maali hopes he is about to wake up from a dream.

The swarm of souls presses closer, berating and badgering the woman in white. You gaze upon the pallid faces, sunken eyes in broken heads, squinted in rage and pain and confusion. The pupils are in shades of bruises and scabs. Scrambled browns, blues and greens – all of which disregard you. You have lived in refugee camps, visited street markets at noon, and fallen asleep at packed casinos. The heave of humanity has never been picturesque. This heave throngs towards you and heaves you away from the counter.

metaphysical thriller civil war Sri Lanka supernatural

Every soul has those seven moons to wander around the In Between, to recall past lives, and to forget.

While he should be completing the tasks to get to The Light, instead he shifts from The In Between back to the present, the Down Below and observes the aftermath of his death.

He tries to direct those close to him towards his most incriminating photographs in order to achieve which he was not able during life. He doesn’t understand quite how these shifts happen, and neither does the reader, making it somewhat confusing to keep up with this trippy journey.

Here’s what you remember from two nights ago: (a) visiting the Leo casino, (b) drinking at the bar, (c) eating the buffet, (d) fooling around with the bartender. here’s what you don’t remember: (a) sitting with a suddha (b) being thrown to your death.

Conversations With the Dead

As well as investigating his own murder, along the way he has conversations with a dead athiest, a dead revolutionary, lawyer, bodyguard, priest, dogs and more. He observes the number of spirits hanging on to the living whispering their ears.

You’ve always thought the voice in your head belonged to someone else. Telling you the story of your life as if it had already happened. The omniscient narrator adding a voiceover to your day. The coach telling you to stop feeling sorry and do what you’re good at. Which was winning at blackjack, seducing young peasants and photographing scary places.

Moons, Chapters and Beats

On his motivation for writing this novel, the author had this to say:

‘I began thinking about [Seven Moons] in 2009, after the end of our civil war, when there was a raging debate over how many civilians died and whose fault it was. A ghost story where the dead could offer their perspective seemed a bizarre enough idea to pursue, but I wasn’t brave enough to write about the present, so I went back 20 years, to the dark days of 1989.’

Not just an author of fiction, Shehan Karunatilaka has also written rock songs and speaks of his work in terms of beats and rhythm, infused with supernatural folklore, ghost stories and history.

It’s a long novel that for me held my interest in parts and then lost me as it shifted, but each time that began to annoy me and slow me down, the narrative would shift back to something of interest and so I persevered, however, I did find it overly long in its digressions, drifting in and out of reality. It’s an undeniably clever, erudite novel, unique in its conception that reminded me a little of the surreal experience of reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

The Judges on A Metaphysical Thriller Winner

In addition to praising its ambitious scope and hilarious audacity of narrative techniques, the Booker judges had this to say of the metaphysical thriller:

‘Life after death in Sri Lanka: an afterlife noir, with nods to Dante and Buddha and yet unpretentious. Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars. Slyly, angrily comic.’

‘This is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west. It is an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to ’the world’s dark heart’ — the murderous horrors of civil war Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justify every human life.’

Have you read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Further Information

Read an Interview With the author Shehan Karunatilka

Click here to read an extract from the first section of the novel – Read an Extract from The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

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By the Sea (2001) by Abdulrazak Gurnah

By the Sea begins as a compelling narrative and mystery of a man who arrives at Gatwick airport from Zanzibar without a visa and refuses to speak English, until the crucial moment where he is about to be deported and he utters the words that will change his trajectory.

Refugee. Asylum.

Old Scores Revisited

Nobel Prize for Literature 2021 Zanzibar Tanzania witing about immigration culture refugees requesting asylum

In trying to locate someone to translate for him, Latif is contacted and the two men realise there is a connection, a history that has perpetuated with major gaps on either side of their understanding, voids often filled by those wishing them ill.

Their story began by the sea and concerned a fragrance Ud-al-qamari, and would be retold far away where few understood the nature of their feuds and punishment, of corruption and power, petty rivalries over debts, possessions, and influences that could drive a man to flee for his life.

The man I obtained the ud-al-qamari from was a Persian trader from Bahrain who had come to our part of the world with the musim, the winds of the monsoons, he and thousands of other traders from Arabia, the Gulf, India and Sind, and the Horn of Africa. They had been doing this every year for at least a thousand years. In the last months of the year, the winds blow steadily across the Indian Ocean towards the coast of Africa, where the currents obligingly provide a channel to harbour. Then in the early months of the new year, the winds turn around and blow in the opposite direction, ready to speed the traders home.

Time Dismembers, Perceptions Unremembered

Told in three parts, the first two focus on each of these characters and their early life in Zanibar and something of their present, while the third part is a kind of oral storytelling as the two meet and their intertwined story is retold from start to finish until a different connection emerges, as they find themselves newly isolated in this place around people uninterested in their journey.

So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.

A drama of disappointment, self-deception and renewal, the novel explores both the double bind of the known culture that entraps, and the unknown culture that frees but isolates the individual, for their betterment, yet never quite attaining an imagined, desired status.

Like Admiring Silence, an excellent, astute read by an accomplished author.

Further reading

My review of Admiring Silence (1996)

Nobel Prize Interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah

Article Guardian on Winning the Nobel Prize

New York Times: Abdulrazak Gurnah Refuses to Be Boxed In: ‘I Represent Me’

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Author

Abdulrazak Gurnah was the Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 for

‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’,

He was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, arriving in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s. After the liberation from British colonial rule in December 1963 Zanzibar went through a revolution which led to oppression and persecution of citizens of Arab origin; massacres occurred. Gurnah belonged to the victimised ethnic group and after finishing school was forced to leave his family and flee the country, by then the newly formed Republic of Tanzania. He was eighteen years old. Not until 1984 was it possible for him to return to Zanzibar, allowing him to see his family shortly before the father’s death.

Themes of Refugee Disruption

Gurnah’s writing is from his time in exile but pertains to his relationship with the place he had left, which means that memory is of vital importance for the genesis of his work. 

The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. His novels depict a culturally diversified East Africa. His dedication to truth and aversion to simplification are striking. It can make the work bleak and uncompromising, however he follows the fates of characters with great compassion and unbending commitment.

His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His most recent novel Theft (2025) is the story of the intertwined lives of three young people coming-of-age in postcolonial East Africa, selected as a book to look out for in 2025 by the Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and BBC.

Until his retirement he had been Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, focusing principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Salman Rushdie.

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The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.

But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

literary fiction Oprahs bookclub immigrant experience fiction Vietnam Lithuania the eldery the disenfranchised marginalised

Ocean Vuong’s latest novel begins with a chapter that stands apart from the rest of the novel, a lyrical description of the New England town of East Gladness, that sits in a valley that when the prehistoric glaciers melted and the river dried up, left a silvery trickle along the basin called Connecticut : Algonguin for ‘long tidal river’.

The chapter ends with the arrival of a nineteen year old boy named Hai, crossing a bridge in September 2009 and climbing the railings.

Though it was true the boy had run out of paths to take, out of ways to salvage his failures, he never planned on jumping off King Philipp’s Bridge that evening. It was only when he glimpsed, between the rail ties, the river swirling so massive below, a place you could slip clean into, that something in him both jolted and withered at once.

Young and Old On the Margins of Society Take Centre

Hearing a voice shouting at him, he encounters 84-year-old Grazina, a Lithuanian widow drifting in and out of the grip of dementia, trying to stay in her home and keep the hallucinations at bay.

Photo by T.Constant Pexels.com

Hai is the son of a first generation Vietnamese immigrant, entrapped in recurring cycles of illusion, failing to achieve promises he made to his mother, leading him deeper into despair.

When these two characters paths cross, it marks the beginning of a shape shifting, temporarily life-altering bond and uplifting experience in both their lives, as together they attempt to navigate the unsustainable circumstances they are desperately confronted with.

The novel traverses a season in the lives of these two, intimately demonstrating the beautiful supporting effect two strangers can have on each other’s lives, when their closer familial ties are unable to.

When the Past Emerges into the Present

Hai is given refuge and in return he monitors Grazina’s medication, he inserts himself in her hallicinatory episodes, gently accompanying her back to safety, while learning something of the traumatic earlier years she has navigated, that return to haunt her.

She stared out the window as he read the first few paragraphs from the story of a man wandering the warscape of his mind after the wars of his body. When he finished, she looked at him from beneath her glasses and said only, “Very well, then.” He was about to say something about the book when the cuckoo clock on the wall behind him went off, the wooden owl shooting out to nod along to a jagged tune spinning in its broken gears. Her eyes lit up. “Ah, 6.43, the hour Vilnius fell to Stalin.” She crossed herself, shut her eyes, and said a prayer under her breath.

The Circumstantial Family

He reaches out to an estranged family member and gets a job in a fast food restaurant and quickly becomes part of a team that are all shouldering their own struggles and dreams and together they become something that extends beyond the comradeship of colleagues, the circumstantial labour family created through simultaneous work shifts; who take risks, find humour and support each other for a brief chapter in each others lives.

It was in these moments that he thought this new life, if you could call it that, wasn’t so bad. That he could bide his time until something ahead of him lifted, like the mist rising each morning above the river outside his window, revealing what was always there. But he was wrong.

The characters of Hai and Grazina are flawed and unforgettable, they are vulnerable, disillusioned and in perfect alignment as they keep each other as stable as possible, until the external world inevitably interferes.

When Kindness and Care Lead

immigrant american culture, chosen family, kindness of strangers

I was reminded a little of the reading experience of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, only I loved this even more, because of the added multicultural layer that came from these characters having connections to another culture and way of being in the world, while trying to survive against the odds in the United States.

They are having to cope with and navigate for one, the effects of ageing and the other, the allure of addiction to regulate an overwhelmed nervous system. The support and consistency they stumble across in each other, shines a ray of light in an otherwise dark and lonely existence.

I really enjoyed this novel, even more than his accomplished debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. There’s so much more to gain from this novel, but I urge you to read it for yourself and gift yourself that experience.

Highly Recommended.

How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of savaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.

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Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

Cerebral Distractions or Healing Attractions

Whereabouts indeed. I have been absent this space and reading less, as I pursued another passion, the great jigsaw puzzle of building a family tree, which started out as an exercise in tracing my female lineage looking for a particular pattern, I felt called to heal and ended up as a series of unfinished mysteries seeking to be resolved. And it is so much fun, imagining and reclaiming these lives!

Well, all of that is another story, but interesting enough to have pulled me away from my regular habit of sharing my reading here. I miss this space, and the interactions, so here we are, sharing a few recent reads.

I picked up the reading again as the temperatures here rocketed into full summer heat and my brain asked, “Can’t we just read a book today?”, instead of spending my free time working like the dedicated closet researcher I had become.

A day at the beach with a Jhumpa Lahiri novel turned the tide.

A Gifted Book Returns Unread

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri translated from Italian by the author

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri is a novel that came back to me, one I gifted a friend from abroad who has a love affair with the city of Rome. Back in Europe to visit the city again, she brought this book I gave her halfway round the world, pulled it out of the suitcase and said:

‘I haven’t read it yet. I’m going to read it in Rome. Here. You have got two weeks to read it before I go. We can talk about it when I get back from Ireland.’

Challenge accepted and quietly delighted; I really wanted to read it too.

Now I have.

I loved it.

It felt like I was reading a work of creative non-fiction. In disguise. Autofiction perhaps?

Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-American author of Bengali parents, whose earlier novels have highlighted the immigrant experience. For some years now she has lived in Italy, learned the language and her last two books were written and published in Italian before being translated into English.

Whereabouts is a collection of short vignettes of one woman’s highly observational, contentedly solitary, existence in Rome. The epigram, a quote from Italo Svevo provides a clue to what follows.

‘Every time my surroundings change I feel enormous sadness.It’s not greater when I leave a place tied to memories, grief, or happiness. It’s the change itself that unsettles me, just as liquid in a jar turns cloudy when you shake it.’

Averse to Change, Loves Movement

Disliking change, but always on the move, her days capture aspects of the surroundings she has grown attached to, taking us right there. The chapter titles nearly all begin with the prepositions: On, In or At.

On the Sidewalk, In the Street, At the Trattoria, In the Piazza, At the Bookstore, On the Couch, On the Balcony, At the Beautician, In the Sun, At my House, In Bed, On the Phone.

Jhumpa Lahiri autofiction Whereabouts set in Rome Italy

Near the end, as I began to notice this pattern and list of locations, I asked myself, “What is this ‘Whereabouts?’ and I flicked back to the contents page and read through the list of destinations. I then turned the page and the only chapter that doesn’t start with a preposition, Nowhere, seemed to be speaking to me, responding to my question.

It began by saying:

‘Because when all is said and done the setting doesn’t matter: the space, the walls, the light. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer.’

This has come just after Up Ahead, a sign of change, something our protagonist does not like and spends the entire short chapter of In Spring pondering. A chapter I sent to another friend, one who shares the protagonist’s dislike of that season.

Transition, Change and Things that Stay the Same

In Spring, a chapter from Jhumpa Lahiri's novel of vignettes Whereabouts

Now, she contemplates a transition; both of the day, and of a life, observing the peripheral characters to this solitary existence she has created, people in movement, marking the end of a day.

‘They’ll keep walking along these sidewalks. They’re permanent fixtures in my mind, knotted up in the fabric of my neighbourhood just like the buildings, the trees, the marble woman. These are the faces that have kept me company for years, and I still don’t know the people they belong to. There’s no point saying goodbye to them, or adding, we’ll meet again, even though right now I’m overflowing with affection for them.’

Overall, it’s a reflective relatively smooth paced novel in which not much happens and yet you feel as though you have visited and lived for a short time in a city apartment in one of the squares of this major European city of Rome, a part of it not populated by tourists, but where the everyday life continues to unfold week after week, year upon year, following the same rhythms, with small changes a natural part of its existence.

‘Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.’

Brilliantly crafted. Could not put it down, read it in a day.

Highly Recommended.

Have you read Whereabouts? Do you have a favourite by Jhumpa Lahiri? Tell us in the comments below.

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House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O’Brien

Back to the final days of Reading Ireland Month 2025, this week I slowly read Edna O’Brien’s political novel House of Splendid Isolation, the first of the Modern Ireland Trilogy, books written in the 1990’s that depict significant events in modern Ireland. The other two novels in that series are Down By the River and Wild Decembers.

Incarceration, Idealism and Ignorance, An Irish Story

Modern Ireland trilogy Edna O'Brien a political novel of the 1990's

House of Splendid Isolation is a story of one event and incidents involving a community, over a few days as a man involved in murderous events is on the loose and actively being hunted.

It is also a book of parts and voices, a child’s voice, the past, the present, a woman Josie who returns to Ireland after a period of youth in Brooklyn, her disappointing yet predictable marriage, an impossible affair and violent retribution, an accident, people who drop by, whose good deeds lead to violent consequences, friendships that hide betrayal, communities that breathe suspicion, harbour fear and occasionally a fugitive.

I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be. Battles, more battles, bloodshed, soft mornings, the saunter of beasts and their young. What I want is for all the battles to have been fought and done with. That’s what I pray for when I pray. At times the grass is like a person breathing, a gentle breath, it hushes things.

A Not So Quiet Last Act

Josie is now a lone widow in a big old house that she came to inhabitant through marriage, she did not wish to die in a Home, she has returned. A nurse visits occasionally and her grocery order is delivered. Memories still haunt her.

The nurse muses why, the older they get, the madder they are for talk; their past, their present, their futures, anything, everything, afraid of death too as if she was not afraid of it herself.

Edna O'Brien The Country Girls The House of Splendid Isolation

Into her last solitary days arrives this unwelcome visitor on the run, they play cat and mouse, wary of each other, challenging each other, co-existing nevertheless, never quite knowing if one can trust the other, providing each other something they need for a brief moment, while the world outside goes mad in their paranoia, the rumour-mill running rampant, suspicions gone mad.

The grass smells good to him and after three months cooped up in a house in a town, he’s tuned to the smell of grass and the fresh smell of cow-dung, to the soft and several lisps of night. He knows his country well, McGrevvy does, but only in dark. The dark is his friend. Daylight his enemy. Who set him up. Who can he trust, not trust.

The Grass Was Never Greener

While their words and worlds would never align, there is something in the brief respite one provides the other in this house of Splendid Isolation, before they each face the inevitable that awaits them; capture or death, peace no longer an option. Here the first confrontation.

‘There’s myself and my maker,’ she says quietly. So this is how it happens, this is how a life is suborned, one’s insides turned to whey, an opening door, a man, hooded, with not a lax muscle in his being, a loaded rifle and outside crows cawing with the same eventide fussiness and no one any the wiser that her time is up.

A novel of many layers and consequences revealed of humans wronged, who know not how to seek healing or harmless resolution, whose path leads to occasional respite en route to destruction.

It brilliantly depicts two faces of a staunchly divided territory, their failed attempts to escape their destiny, a brutal confrontation and a land that continues to absorb the repercussions.

Forward, back, slow, quick, slow

The writing moves from poetic, contemplative reflection to rapid, coarse dialogue to action oriented tension as the slow hours spent in captivity contrast with the build up externally as the police net closes in on the fugitives location. At times the prose is sparse, and other times it shifts as our protagonist loses her grip on reality and shifts into past memories or present situations that confuse her.

It’s not a straight forward read, as it navigates and holds all these time frames, but it propels forward at a good pace and leaves the reader with much to reflect on.

A Year With Edna O’Brien

I read this for Reading Ireland Month 2025 with Cathy at 746Books and also for Cathy and Kim’s A Year With Edna O’Brien which they are doing in 2025. Kim will be reading another of the Modern Ireland trilogy novels, Wild Decembers in August.

Further Reading

My review of Edna O’Brien’s renowned Country Girls Trilogy (initially banned in Ireland due to its bold faced portrayal of a young woman’s quest for independence and awakening sexuality) consists of three novels: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). It was re-released in 1986 in a single volume including a revised ending to Girls in Their Married Bliss and the addition of an epilogue.

Author, Edna O’Brien

Edna O’Brien was born in December 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare. She died in 2024, having written over 20 works of fiction, known to provoke, dissect and dig into social, cultural and religious issues deep in the fabric of Irish society.

In addition to The Country Girls trilogy, her novels include A Pagan Place (1970), the story of a girl growing up in rural Ireland, winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Zee & Co (1972); Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), a story of love, murder and revenge; Time and Tide (1992), winner of a Writers’ Guild Award, the story of a young wife who faces a crisis when she leaves her husband and is forced to fight for the custody of her sons.

She is the author of a trilogy of novels about modern Ireland: House of Splendid Isolation (1994), she writes about Irish nationalism and sectarian violence; Down by the River (1996), based on the true story of a young Irish rape victim forced to travel to England for a legal abortion; and Wild Decembers (1999), about a farmer, Joseph Brennan, and his sister, Breege, living in an isolated rural community. In the Forest (2002), is based on the true story of a disturbed, abused young man who murdered a young mother, her infant son and a Catholic priest in the west of Ireland in the early 1990s. The Light of Evening (2006) and Byron in Love (2009), Haunted (2010), The Little Red Chairs (2016), Girl (2020), Joyce’s Women (2022).

She wrote Mother Ireland (1976), a travelogue with photographs by Fergus Bourke, and a biography of James Joyce, published in 1999. She is the author of several plays. In 2021 she was awarded the French Ordre des Arts et Des Lettres.

“I wanted to write from as far back as I can recall. Words seemed and still seem an alchemy, and story the true conductor of life, of lives.”

Reading Ireland Month 2025