The Old Jest

Author	Iris Murdoch
ISBN	0140041117

Swinging between his wife and his mistress in the sacred and profane love machine and between the charms of morality and the excitements of sin, the psychotherapist, Blaise Gavender, sometimes wishes he could divide himself in two. Instead, he lets loose misery and confusion and—for the spectators...

Author	Jane Gardam
ISBN	0349102260

What is truly amazing about this book is how all the different pieces hold together! I would say that this is what characterizes Gardam’s books.

We are given a complicated puzzle that is begging to be solved. For people who love solving puzzles or mysteries, it is a must read.

When...

Author	David Lodge
ISBN	0140057463

This 1980 novel by Lodge (whom you may have noticed I've been reading a lot of and enjoying this year) follows a group of young English Catholics over a period of about 20 years, enabling us to see the ways their religion affects their lives (and their lives affect their religion), particularly in the shadow...

Author

Joan Brady

"[A] vivid historical novel--part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic."
TIME
Taking flight from an extraordinary real-life family history, here is a riveting novel of how the past lives on, generation after generation. THEORY OF WAR is the richly imagined story of one...

Author	Patrick Neate
ISBN	0802140564

This rich and epic novel is written with each chapter a phrase of a twelve bar blues structure, each of the different pieces of the harmonic progression coordinating with a different storyline.

The book begins with a Prologue set in the mythical Afican kingdom of Zimindo in 1790, where two young...

Author	Lindsay Clarke
ISBN	0449001180

I read this last December and enjoyed it immensely. It had been recommended to me twenty years ago, and finally I have been able to get to it. I could easily give it five stars, but then I would be only thinking of myself. Truth is, Clarke is a bit verbose for some tastes. And though I prefer more minimalist,...

Author	Paul Theroux
ISBN	0140050728

World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant...

Author	Beryl Bainbridge
ISBN	0349116113

"He almost took the wrong turning at the next roundabout. Muriel remained silent but pointed a contemptuous finger, at the last moment, in the correct direction"

Its that little clause at the last moment that captures the delight of this odd awkward story. The awkwardness is not of the writing,...

Author	William Trevor
ISBN	0140047182

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The main character comes across at first as a special ed kid, but as the story evolves we see that he is truly mentally disturbed. He’s an older teenager who is cast aside by his family. He has no father and his mother and older sister are good buddies, laughing, smoking, eating...

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	Susan Hill
ISBN	0140040722

Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...

Author	Edna O'Brien
ISBN	0452274524

O'Brien builds a puzzle, but once the pieces are all in place, she doesn't offer a solution. To do so would be trite. What she succeeds in doing is make clear the complexity of Ireland by giving her characters the space they need to become known and thus to become sympathetic. Not every single character...

Author	Claire Keegan
ISBN	0802170498

Claire Keegan’s brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Now she has delivered her next, much-anticipated book, Walk the Blue Fields, an unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories...

Author	Paul Sayer
ISBN	0340508043

(Winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award, The Comforts of Madness is narrated by a catatonic who never speaks. To the rest of the world he is an inert body and is subjected to a variety of experiments, but his own consciousness is vital and reflective. This novel draws attention to the fact that we can never really...

Author	Frederick Philip Grove
ISBN	0771099614

Settlers of the Marsh was first published in 1925, after a struggle by the author to persuade publishers that his first novel would meet public acceptance. Some critics immediately condemned this hypnotic story of the loss of innocence on the Manitoba frontier, calling it “obscene” and “indecent.”...

Author	Frank O'Connor
ISBN	0905169891

This collection of stories centers on the theme of the Irish Revolution. O'Connor is concerned with the way in which war imposes a false and cruel ethic on people, ruthlessly destroying human relationships. The title story has been widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of the short story form.

This...

Author	Dermot Bolger
ISBN	0156006332

"Devised and edited" by Dermot Bolger, Finbar's Hotel pools the efforts of seven acclaimed Irish novelists -- Joseph O'Connor, Anne Enright, Colm Toíbín, Roddy Doyle, Jennifer Johnston, Hugo Hamilton, and Bolger himself -- in a humorous and suspenseful collaborative novel. A Dublin landmark...

Author	Catherine Cookson
ISBN	0552140643

Mary Hetherington was a mother who dominated her family. She was kind, efficient and generous - providing they did what she wanted. But when David brought home Sarah from the 'wrong end' of the Fifteen Streets, a girl who brought life and laughter into her dustless house, she soon took against her.

Then...

Author	Dermot Healy
ISBN	0156005824

'A Goat's Song' is what I would class a perfect contemporary Irish novel and a perfect modern love story (by love I mean star-crossed love). The real skill in the story is the format, which flits forwards and backwards in time, between different characters and their perspectives but this is effortless....

Author	Christy Brown
ISBN	0436070901

This was a dollar shelf find while traveling around, my other choice was book on the psychology of serial killers. Fortunately, my lack of palette for gory true crime won out over my current obsession with neuroscience and I got this book instead. This isn't so much of a novel as it seems a impressionistic...

Author	William Humphrey
ISBN	0807120677

Twelve years after Hannah Hunnicutt was committed to a Dallas asylum, her body is brought home to northeast Texas to be buried alongside those of her husband and son. Etched on all three gravestones is the same date of death: May 28, 1939.

Home from the Hill is the story of that tragic day and the...

Author

Patrick McCabe

From the award-winning author of "The Butcher Boy" comes a new novel of extraordinary power that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "confirm[s] McCabe's standing as one of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of Ireland".In "The Dead School", Patrick McCabe returns to the emotionally...

Author	Ken Bruen
ISBN	0593057279

cross /kros/ n., v., & adj.
1 an ancient instrument of torture
2 in a very bad humour
3 a punch thrown across an opponent's punch

Jack Taylor brings death and pain to everyone he loves. His only hope of redemption - his surrogate son, Cody - is lying in hospital in a coma. At least...