Grace Notes

Author	Mick Jackson
ISBN	0140274375

Where does eccentricity end and madness begin?
So, perhaps every creature carries inside it a living flame – a modest candlepower. If, for some reason, the flame falters, the creature's existence is put at risk. But if our inner flame flares up and engulfs us, madness is the result.
The main...

Author	William McIlvanney
ISBN	0340407573

His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.

Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...

Author	Brian O'Doherty
ISBN	1885983395

In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the reputedly shameful demise of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born. Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which...

Author

Jennifer Johnston

Derry in the 1970s: teenager Joe Logan is growing up in the teeth of the Troubles, having to cope with embittered parents, a brother who's been away and come back with money and a gun in his pocket, harsh school teachers, and the constant awareness of the military presence in the background. Central to...

Author	Fay Weldon
ISBN	0340595809

Praxis is an interesting book to come back to for many reasons, but as I read it in tandem with Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, the two books worked, rather curiously with no small amount of synchronicity–odd really as the books are about entirely different things, for while Life after Life explores...

Author	Michael Collins
ISBN	0743218035

The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the "Truth," the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the...

Author	Anne Donovan
ISBN	1841954519

Anne Marie's dad, a Glaswegian painter and decorator, has always been game for a laugh. So when he first takes up meditation at the Buddhist Center, no one takes him seriously. But as Jimmy becomes more involved in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into conflict with the needs of his...

Author	Andrew O'Hagan
ISBN	0771068352

First Canadian publication of the powerful debut novel from the author of Be Near Me.

Finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Whitbread Award.

Hugh Bawn was a modern hero, a visionary urban planner, a man of the people who revolutionized...

Author	George Mackay Brown
ISBN	0862418143

Seamus Heaney once remarked that George Mackay Brown passed everything “through the eye of the needle of Orkney”, those remote islands north of Scotland where he was born and spent his life. This observation is certainly true of Magnus. The novel treats of aristocratic ambition, rousing...

Author	James Robertson
ISBN	0007150253

Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of...

Author	Andrew Crumey
ISBN	1909232807

"Pfitz manifests the same healthy disdain for realism that made his first novel, Music in a Foreign Language, such a pleasant surprise. His borrowings from Borges, Calvino and Pavic are here just as shameless. But at this rate Crumey may yet become a hero to fans of the postmodern Euro-novel who wonder...

Author	William Trevor
ISBN	0140107487

This is another very quirky book from the 1970 Booker shortlist - another book with comic elements and a dark human story at its centre, which is clearly something the judges that year liked, as both the winner The Elected Member and Eva Trout have similarities.

The setting for this one is O'Neill's...

Author	Dermot Bolger
ISBN	0007154119

"Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created for yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were."

An poignant discourse on the idea of "home," especially in a situation--so intense in Ireland, but resonant everywhere--that one might...

Author	Michèle Roberts
ISBN	1853816000

Man Booker Prize Nominee (1992)

Booker Prize Finalist, Daughters of the House is Michèle Roberts' acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath of World War II. Thérèse and Leonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in Normandy. Intrigued by parents'...

Author

Tim Parks

At the midpoint of his life, Jerry Marlow finds himself on a bus from Milan to Strasbourg, taking stock of the wreckage strewn behind him -- a failed marriage, a daughter going astray, and an affair that has left him both numb and licking every wound, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even his teaching job...

Author	Martin Booth
ISBN	0312267533

The remarkably powerful and critically acclaimed novel that was chosen as A New York Times Notable Book of 1999 and shortlisted for The Booker Prize

The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950's. Eventually...

Author

Brian Moore

Somewhere in an unnamed Eastern bloc country, someone is out to silence Cardinal Bern. Is it the Secret Police, or is it - more shockingly - fanatical Catholic activists who believe that Bern, by keeping the peace between Church and State, has finally compromised himself too far?

Narrowly...

Author	Penelope Lively
ISBN	0060971991

I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.

This link contains a plot description – as well as one of the three central characters (who all appear as point of view characters, in some cases all three observing the same scene)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accordi...

I...

Author	Madeleine St. John
ISBN	0786706791

Nicola only went to buy cigarettes and upon returning finds a stranger in her apartment. He looks like her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan, but he can't actually be the dependable known quantity whom Nicola loves that goes by the name of Jonathan. Can he? Before Nicola stands a man who is strong and adorable...

Author	Andrew Miller
ISBN	0340728264

Oxygen

Andrew Miller

Having enjoyed Andrew Miller’s beautifully crafted prose in ‘Pure’ it wasn’t surprising to discover the same elegantly perceptive writing in “Oxygen” except that my enjoyment was heightened by the sensitive unravelling of his characters facing...

Author	Anne Enright
ISBN	0771030738

From the author of the Man Booker Prize— winning literary sensation and long-time Globe and Mail bestseller The Gathering, comes a dazzling, seductive new collection of stories.

“Anne Enright’s style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion’s; the scope of her understanding is...

Author	Deirdre Madden
ISBN	0312429541

A Finalist for the Orange Prize


It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly's possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many...

Author	Patrick McCabe
ISBN	0060931582

Breakfast on Pluto became a #1 bestseller in Ireland, stayed on the bestseller list for months, and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the...

Author	Mary Costello
ISBN	1906539219

An elderly schoolteacher recalls the single act of youthful passion that changed her life forever; a young gardener has an unsettling encounter with a suburban housewife; a wife who miscalculated the guarantees of marriage embarks upon an online affair. And in the title story a teenage girl strikes...