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  Keith Ridgeway is apparently a writer in the 'modernist tradition in Irish Fiction' (whatever that means), but this is not like any other Irish writing I have come across in my (admittedly limited) experience.  There are no farms, no endless cups of tea, no mean auld Mammys driving all fifteen children to drink/drugs/atheism, and not even a mention of mashed potatoes (well, I don't remember any anyway).  This is a collection of short stories about a group of people living their lives in suburban London.  They have their jobs and when they come home they potter about.  There is a lot of pottering about doing all the stuff people do at home - including the private stuff that they wouldn't want you looking in on - but there you are peering into their lives as though you have a set of binoculars trained on their windows.  The writing style is conspiratorial and you keep watching and watching until you are lulled by the normalness of it all and then you get th...

  This is not a work of fiction, this is a memoir. This is truth, humanity, love and loss. Pain, anxiety, support, and empathy. Soul searching, risk, inaction and action. Identity, lies, hope and lust. Religion, translation, poetry and guilt, and all the while it is not fiction, and it will stay with you.

  The picture on the front of this book is a fairly accurate representation of what you can expect from the writing inside.  The tone is dark and carries the mental dust of difficult memories, and as I was reading, I just wanted someone to turn the lights on and open a window.   I pulled this off the New Books shelf in the library and a little way into the book I flipped back to the copyright page just to make sure this had actually been written recently, and sure enough, it was published in 2020.  It just felt older somehow.  Years back, I read and enjoyed The Gathering that won the Booker Prize for Enright in 2007, and the writing style in Actress carries much the same formality and intelligence, but even the pivotal moments in the plot are delivered without much enthusiasm. The reader is given the story of Irish theatre legend, Katherine O'Dell, as told by her daughter Norah, and although Katherine experienced early stardom in Hollywood then we...

  Published: 2017, Penguin Random House Genre: Fiction Themes: Small town America, poverty, secrets  My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ Secrets.   Secrets from the past or the present.  Secrets carried like a stone in a shoe, unseen but always there rubbing, rubbing and not going away.  Elizabeth Strout exposes the carefully hidden secrets kept by some apparently nice people from the rural town of Amgash, Illinois, and by the time you get to the end of this novel you will be watching your friends and neighbours wondering what they might be hiding from you.  We all like to make wild assumptions about people (well that is what gossip is for, surely?) but what if all that secret stuff came tumbling out?  How would they cope and how would it change them? The secrets in this book range from heartbreaking to downright horrible and the reader is a voyeur of the unfolding events.  I could almost hear my mother's voice warning me to 'Stop gawping and come alo...

  Published:  2020, Faber and Faber Genre: Fiction Themes:  love, domestic violence, Trinidad, relationships My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If you distilled this story down to it's purest element, you would find a mother's love glistening strong and bright.  A love that refuses to give up, even when life seemed intent on testing it to destruction. Set in Trinidad, this is the emotionally charged story of Betty, who finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage to Sunil, and although she can deal with his drunken violence against herself, a line is crossed when he starts to mistreat her little son Solo.  Sunil was a good man when they married, with his dashing good looks and charming ways, but once he took to drinking regularly with his brother, it didn't take much for his temper to flare and she knew it wouldn't be long before her skin was bruised and sometimes bones broken.  He was always sorry of course, and he knew a shady doctor who would patch Betty ba...