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Annie is nine months pregnant. She’s shopping for a crib at IKEA. That’s when the massive earthquake hits. Propulsive, disruptive, funny, terrifying, ‘Tilt’ is a novel about how the foundations of our lives are built and shaken. About a woman trying to walk back to the husband she’s long been pushing away. About put-off dreams and inevitability and what makes us keep moving forward.
A woman recalls the time her grandfather claimed to have met Jesus. A professional musician travels across the world and through her memories with a violin older than the USA. A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. Transporting and profound, these are stories of love, grief, and the ways that lives can be haunted.
This is a 24-hour urban love story. It follows Stephen Connolly through one of the worst days of his life. On a stiflingly hot December day, he has decided it’s time to break up with his girlfriend Fiona. He’s 39, aimless and unfulfilled; he’s without a clue working out how to make his life better. As an ordinary day develops into an existential crisis, Stephen begins to understand, perhaps too late, that love is not a trap, and only he can free himself.
Welcome to the Kennedy household: There’s Lila who wrote a bestseller about keeping your marriage alive. Now divorced, she watches her ex play happy families with another woman. There’s Bill – her stepdad – who moved in after Lila’s mum died. Celie, Lila’s eldest, hates school. Hates it so much she’s stopped going. Violet is nine and sings age-inappropriate rap songs, laughs at fart jokes and Lila dearly hopes she’ll never, ever change. Lastly, there’s Truant the dog. He’s just taken a bite out of the American actor who’s suddenly landed on the Kennedy’s doorstep. This is Gene – Lila’s estranged father, he walked out on Lila and her mum years ago – and wherever he goes domestic discord follows. Because Gene’s presence changes things in unexpected ways. Soon the girls discover a kindred spirit in a man always chasing life’s joys. Something is happening to the Kennedy household – but what is it? And will it break, or save, their family?
For Niamh Ryan, the Foleys are family. Her childhood flew by on their farm, playing with her best friend Peter and his sister Kate – all the while being doted on by their mother Helen and coached by their father Liam, a legendary former hurling player. Now, following a distressing series of events, the family ties are strained. Niamh receives drunken phone calls and messages from Peter who can’t understand what derailed their burgeoning relationship three years ago. Meanwhile, Helen Foley is trying her best to escape her life by checking into guesthouses under the names of women she went to school with. In her life in Belfast, Kate is attempting to hold down a job and a relationship while carrying the weight of the family’s secrets, and feeling like she is the one to blame. As a family wedding looms, and the women find themselves face to face, the knotty love that still binds Niamh, Helen and Kate might just bring them back together aga
Thomas Flett works a difficult life on the shores, while secretly dreaming up folk music compositions. After striking an unlikely friendship with a man who claims to be a Hollywood film director, Thomas’s future seems at once closer and further away. A considerate novel about aspirations, hope, class, and pining, while the sea looms ominously in the background. I also very much recommend following the book’s ending prompt and listening to a “real-life” recording of Thomas’s song.
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Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street, and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream. When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?
Unlike any kind of “murder mystery” I’ve ever read…a clever sideways look at the genre. Alternating chapters take you effortlessly through two different worlds, and the result is original, funny, and heartbreaking. Witty treats for fans of a good old-fashioned Poirot, interspersed with a compassionate story about the mystery of grief. Was such a surprising read, I love this. (Note: while smart and funny, the tale is also sad! One to remember in case buying this for a holiday mystery book).
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A detective calls on a shell-shocked group of friends in this thrillingly inventive novel of love and grief with a murder-mystery twist.
In the scorching New York heat, a hundred people wait to be selected as jurors. Paul is reading a newspaper. Catherine is reading a novel. So begins a whirlwind flirtation: over cappuccinos in Manhattan and gallery trips to Chelsea, Paul and Catherine escape into the illusion of an Italian getaway. Their feelings quickly evolve into something deeper, something – as mature adults with lives of their own – Paul and Catherine must carry on in secret, with the understanding that anything more than a casual crush is out of the question. But as the sultry summer week draws to a close, the end of their rendezvous comes into focus, and Paul and Catherine are forced to decide whether to act on their feelings or leave the fantasy of what could have been to the annals of the past.
Once a shy young man from a town in Hungary, István is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the 21st century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. Spare and penetrating, ‘Flesh’ asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend’s students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor’s childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation.
For readers of David Nicholls, Ann Patchett, and Colm Tóibìn, Almost Life is a love story that begins when Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-C?ur in 1978. Theirs is a story that will last a lifetime – even if their lives take them in very different directions.
In the aftermath of a massacre from which he doubts the world will ever recover, Ferdinand Draxler finds himself at the crossroads of history. Unless it’s just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature. The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who accuses him of genocide, Draxler longs to be a hero for his people or the comic scourge of their enemies, but does he have the mettle to be either? He isn’t even sure he has what it takes to go mad. He wades through protests and searches London for menacing graffiti, whilst dodging the warring staff in the primary school where he is headmaster and the pleas of his non-Jewish wife to seek ‘mental health’ support. But can’t she see that the world is crumbling around them, and he is at the centre?
Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region – from New England to Florida to California – these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme: the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us. Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every ‘improvement’, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars? Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window. These are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children.
Thought-provoking and powerfully ambivalent, this book offers an extraordinary meditation on the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust. It is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement. It asks what it means to be a Jew in the long wake of the 20th century, and how the past lives on in the present.
It is late September in 2001 and the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. Her mother died long ago and now, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, Cora is adrift and alone. Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten promise. There the story of her family is hidden, and in her presence will begin to unspool.
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