The Charwoman's Daughter

Author	Edna O'Brien
ISBN	0140021086

In one interview Edna said

I was reading van Gogh’s letters. My God! I’m surprised he cut off only one ear

Not relevant at all, but it is funny.

On to the book. So, in 1962, one year before Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique kicked off the 2nd wave of feminism, and one year before...

Author	Esther Freud
ISBN	0880016884

Quaint & beautiful. Why Kate Winslet played the mother in the film version after doing "Titanic" is obvious... this is an attractive role. The matriarch is positively enigmatic, & the little girls are total darlings. Morocco is a land of enchantment & magic (my one day spent there was one...

Author	Brendan Behan
ISBN	1567921051

This miracle of autobiography and prison literature begins: "Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs: 'Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Sacred Heart, Boy, there's two gentlemen here to see you.' I knew by the screeches of her that the gentlemen were not calling to inquire after my health . . . I grabbed...

Author	May Sinclair
ISBN	0860681068

Harriett is the Victorian embodiment of all the virtues then viewed as essential to the womanly ideal: a woman reared to love, honour and obey. Idolising her parents, she learns from childhood to equate love with self-sacrifice, so that when she falls in love with the fiance of her closest friend, there...

Author	John McGahern
ISBN	0571195261

Did you read any great novels recently about a thoroughly decent man? A guy who wasn’t violent and treated everyone with humanity and tried to look on the bright side? No, me neither. That is why Ulysses is so great. Leopold Bloom is that guy, always trying the cheer up his fellow struggler, always looking...

Author	Edith Anna Oenone Somerville
ISBN	1879941406

Absolutely hilarious. The British judge, Major Yeates the RM (for Royal Magistrate), arrives in rain, soon offered a horse by his savvy landlord who's already overcharging: "…a stout grey animal. I recognised with despair that I was about to be compelled to buy a horse. Jolting to my entrance gate...

Author	Flann O'Brien
ISBN	1564780910

The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and...

Author

Charles Robert Maturin

Un gran novelón gótico. Con Maturin ya sabes que te puedes esperar: páginas y páginas de historias que se entremezclan entre sí y que están tan bien narradas que son capaces de llevarte al tiempo y lugar donde sucedieron. Las descripciones del autor son muy precisas y al igual que con Melmoth la...

Author	Maria Edgeworth
ISBN	0140436448

A great early nineteenth-century episodic novel of an orphan boy's rise to the upper classes, in the tradition of Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews et al. The eponymous Harry Ormand is raised side-by-side with the son of the local lord, Sir Ulick O'Shane; his low-birth, however, keeps him from developing the...

Author

George Gissing

With the growth of his militant egoism, there had developed in Godwin Peak an excess of nervous sensibility which threatened to deprive his character of the initiative rightly belonging to it. Self-assertion is the practical complement of self-esteem. To be largely endowed with the latter quality,...

Author	Maxim Gorky
ISBN	0900948248

Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, Soviet novelist, playwright & essayist, who was a founder of social realism. Although known principally as a writer, he was closely associated with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. Of all Gorky's novels, The Artamonov...

Author	Ardal O'Hanlon
ISBN	0340693088

So young Dougal from Father Ted has gone and written a book now has he? Well lets see, what's it all about then?

Patrick Scully, the wee bollox, is living life at large up above in Dublin and is trying to make his own way in the world. A typical story you might think a young man finding his feet, making...

Author	Elizabeth Bowen
ISBN	1400031052

In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive...

Author	James Plunkett
ISBN	0815969090

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Author	John Banville
ISBN	1567920969

A historian, trying to finish a long-overdue book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage not far by train from Dublin for the summer. All he needs, he thinks, is a few weeks of concentrated work. Why, he must unravel, did Newton break down in 1693? What possessed him to write that strange letter to his friend John...

Author

Tim Robinson

Tim Robinson’s epic exploration of the desolate, storm-lashed, limestone rocks, which have already haunted generations of Irish writers, takes the form of a clockwise journey around the coast. Every cliff, inlet and headland reveals layers of myth and historical memory, and Robinson makes beautifully...

Author	Edith Wharton
ISBN	1421804298

"Bunner Sisters," written in 1892 but not published until 1916 in Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant...

Author	Eilís Dillon
ISBN	0905169964

I liked this a lot: it's beautifully written and well observed.

However, the writing style is very odd to an early twenty-first century reader. We've got used to reading a third person limited point of view in contemporary fiction: i.e. third person that's very close to first person -- we're...

Author	Storm Jameson
ISBN	0706608429

This outstanding collection is made up of two short novels, A Day Off and The Single Heart, and three long stories which show the variety of the author's great writing skills that make her one of the most distinguished of women writers.

In A Day Off, Jameson tells of a day in the life of a middle-aged...

Author	Rebecca West
ISBN	0450000885

Harriet Hume’s unchanging beauty and commitment to her art stand in stark contrast to Arnold Condorex’s more worldly goals. After a romantic tryst, she discovers that she can read his mind, but Arnold, with his sights set on moving up in the world, quickly parts from the mysterious lady. As they...

Author	Ciro Alegría
ISBN	0850362822

La misma reseña en español e inglés.
Same review spanish and english.

Esta novela es fantástica!! no es solo un relato bien trabajado y logrado de la realidad indígena en latino-américa ,sino también del carácter firme y verdadero de los seres humanos que luchan por obtener paz...

Author	Kathleen Olmstead
ISBN	1402726651

Dickens� timeless novel transports young readers to a colorful Victorian England filled with mistreated orphans, grim workhouses, and gangs of thieving children. The hero finds himself in dire circumstances after he dares to beg for more food in the orphanage. Determined to make his way...

Author	Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
ISBN	0865433607

Who is Matigari? Is he young or old; a man or fate; dead or living...or even a resurrection of Jesus Christ? These are the questions asked by the people of this unnamed country, when a man who has survived the war for independence emerges from the mountains and starts making strange claims and demands....