The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

review by Maryom 

Starting in 1940s Ireland and running to the present day, The Heart's Invisible Furies is the story - cradle to grave - of Cyril Avery. Even before his birth, it's made clear that he's not wanted by society - his unmarried mother is shamed in front of her family and neighbours by the village priest, physically thrown out of the church and told in no uncertain terms to leave town and never come back! As an adopted child and later a homosexual man, Cyril is constantly made to feel an outsider, unwanted and unloved. 

Given a home by an odd emotion-less couple, Cyril is deprived of affection, constantly told he isn't a 'real Avery' by his adoptive father and generally treated rather like a decorative piece of furniture. It's no surprise therefore that when he meets charismatic youngster Julian, Cyril is instantly infatuated and the seeds are sown for an on/off lifetime friendship. As he grows into manhood, Cyril comes to acknowledge that he's gay, again putting himself outside society's norms (at least for 1960s Ireland), forcing him to lead a double life, hiding his true self and ultimately leading to a foolish act which forces him to flee Ireland. 

This latest work by John Boyne is a wonderful, sweeping epic spanning seventy years. Although it deals with many 'issues', this is the tale of one particular man's life, but a life inextricably bound up with Ireland's own story - from the tyrannical role played by the church in the 40s and 50s, and the degrading of anyone who doesn't fit within the accepted norms, to the liberal attitude of today. Throughout Cyril's life, from IRA outrages to mingling with politicians and literary figures, he seems to have been involved in, or on the periphery of, major events.

The book opens dramatically with a scene that, with its echoes of Hester Prynne's shaming in The Scarlet Letter, feels more like something from 17th century New England than 20th century Europe. Although I've read much about the near absolute control held over people's lives by the Catholic Church in Ireland, I was still stunned that such a scene could have taken place not that long ago!
From there, the story leaps forward in bursts, picking up Cyril's story at seven year intervals, each marking a significant point in his life, as he struggles to define himself (he's certainly not a 'real Avery', as his adoptive father never fails to point out!), and to find acceptance and love. His choices aren't always the best but it does feel that he's trying to be honest and do what he feels is right - the consequences though are too often tragic. 

Telling the story in the first person, Boyne uses dialogue to both further the story and shed insight on characters' emotions. I particularly loved the exchanges between Cyril and the women in his life, which capture their warmth and playfulness of their relationships; I actually thought at one point that his mother might steal the show from him completely, with her talk of elderly ladies ogling their gym instructor! The structure still allows the reader to know things which Cyril doesn't, and characters appear time and again without Cyril realising their significance to his story; it's cleverly done, and doesn't feel like too great a coincidence but I did find myself urging Cyril to ask just the right question that would reveal so much.

I read a review e-copy so didn't realise the length - just over 600 pages - till I was searching out links for this review, but I loved every bit and wouldn't want to cut a single page. It's full of everything from joy to despair, and I can't believe anyone could read it and not be moved. 

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Doubleday

Genre - adult fiction 

The Silent Dead by Claire McGowan

review by Maryom

Five people, four men and a woman, have gone missing from the area around Ballyterrin, near the Northern Ireland/Eire border. All were members of a breakaway Republican group, all suspected, tried, but not convicted, of having planted a bomb which killed sixteen innocent by-standers. Perhaps they've decided to leave the area completely - though for all five of them to do so on the same day seems unlikely - but then bodies start to turn up..... and DI Guy Brooking and his missing persons unit realise they're looking at kidnapping and murder. Who could be behind this increasingly grisly series of deaths - another branch of the Republican movement, one that's now more interested in promoting the peace process and legitimate political careers? Loyalists looking for revenge? Or maybe someone with closer links to the bomb victims?


This third book of the Paula Maguire series sees her caught up in an unusually disturbing case, one which raises issues about punishment and retribution. Popular opinion considers the missing five as terrorists, holding them responsible for a dreadful crime, placing a bomb on a busy high street; should they be entitled to police protection? Wouldn't the world be safer without them?  As the fifth anniversary of the bombing approaches, with the unveiling of a memorial planned, DI Guy Brooking and his team are working against the clock to find out who is responsible for these disappearances.
 Despite being seven months pregnant, and absolutely everyone she knows advising her to take things easy, Paula is convinced that as a forensic psychologist she can play a helpful role in finding the kidnappers and, of course, it helps distract her from the problems of her private life - small things like having a baby in a few weeks time and not being able to name the father, and the ongoing search for her 'disappeared' mother. 
 Set against the backdrop of modern Northern Ireland, Claire McGowan tells a story that will hook you with its twists and turns, but leave you wondering about the deeper issues behind it. It portrays a town still trying to come to terms with its past during the years of the Troubles but trying to build a lasting peace,despite having once been on opposing sides. This is seen through Paula's eyes, with her mother never having been officially accounted for, and through the long terms effects on the bomb victims' families, for whom nothing will ever be the same again.

This isn't a story that's easy to read or one for the squeamish - there are graphic descriptions of the injuries caused by a bomb blast that will upset anyone - but at its heart lies a interestingly knotty moral dilemma. The missing five haven't been found guilty of the crime they're accused of - is it right for others to take justice into their own hands? What do you think?

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime


Paula Maguire 1; The Lost
Paula Maguire 2; The Dead Ground

Favourite Irish Books #IrishFictionFortnight

  BleachHouseLibrary blog is currently holding an #IrishFictionFortnight focussing on, well you've guessed, Irish writers and their works, and I've been visiting regularly, discovering new writers and entering some of the giveaways. It all started me thinking about my favourite Irish writers and books ..... and the list kept growing...

 Even in an English school the curriculum was liberally sprinkled with Irish fiction - from Swift's Gulliver's Travels in primary school to WB Yeats' poetry, Synge and O'Casey's plays and  James Joyce and Samuel Beckett novels at secondary. After school I discovered more recent authors through my local library - Maeve Binchy, Edna O'Brien, John Banville, Colm Toibin and Roddy Doyle - but I think it's only since I've started blogging and, importantly, chatting about books on Twitter that the vast range of Irish writing has become apparent.

So.... favourites.... well, my Top Ten stretched a little to eleven recommendations, and then I asked The Mole who dominated a Top Three...

Number one spot has to go to relative newcomer, Donal Ryan - he's only two novels to his name so far, but what stunners they are! Multi-voiced The Spinning Heart and its 'prequel'  The Thing About December will wring your heart and make you laugh and everything in-between.

 I've long been aware of John Boyne but mainly thought of him as a children's writer, probably due to the publicity surrounding The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Last year though I read his latest adult novel A History of Loneliness looking at the sex scandals in the Irish church from the point of view of an innocent priest. It's hard-hitting and moving, and made me determined to read more by the author.


Hoping that place of birth qualifies her as Irish, I'd like to include Maggie O'Farrell, especially The Hand That First Held Mine and Instructions For A Heatwave
and in a similar vein of fiction, debut author Johanna Lane's Black Lake a story of a family in crisis, trying to cope with overwhelming loss.

Another impressive debut last year came from Audrey Magee with The Undertaking set in Germany and on its Eastern front during WW2.






I read a lot of crime thrillers so had to include some from both north and south of the border -
Claire McGowan's thrillers  The Lost and  The Dead Ground set in the fictional border town of Ballyterrin which mix present day crime with the legacy of The Troubles;                                                                       
Niamh O'Connor's Dublin-set Jo Birmingham series starting with If I Never See You Again
Colin Bateman's Dan Starkey series that I've just discovered with The Dead Pass
                                                                
Neil Mackay's All The Little Guns Went Bang, Bang, Bang is a different, extremely disturbing, crime novel exploring how violence begets violence as two eleven year olds embark on a Natural Born Killers style spree of increasing brutality. Chilling stuff.

Time for something lighter ... I discovered Maria Duffy's light-hearted novels of everyday life through chatting on Twitter, so her novel Any Dream Will Do about virtual Twitter friends meeting up in real life seems really appropriate.

Also through Twitter I discovered Denise Deegan and her insightful teen /YA Butterfly novels dealing with a range of teenage problems from bullying to pregnancy.


So there's my picks - what would The Mole choose....

Eoin Colfer and Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian has to be my favourite! What is not to love about Artemis and Holly Short? Well actually as this is the last of the Artemis Fowl books I suppose just that - an end of series, never a happy time.

Alan Monaghan and The Soldier's Song also has to be my favourite. It is a story of the First World War and Stephen enlists as an officer in the British Army. For Stephen
it as a time of horrors and loss and the book deserved far more accolades than it got.

Brian Gallagher's  Stormclouds is set during the troubles in Northern Ireland and is a book you won't "enjoy" but may get a better understanding of the lives that the citizens of NI, particularly children, lived at that time. It's a book well worth reading but be strong and stick it out.




To find more visit BleachHouseLibrary or follow the #IrishFictionFortnight tag on Twitter

Black Lake by Joanna Lane

review by Maryom

This is a story that opens with a family in crisis - Marianne has decided to fetch her daughter Kate home from boarding school, and hide out in a disused part of their rambling stately home - keeping everyone, husband John included, at bay and creating a safe haven where the world can't intrude. From this point, it backtracks to explore how the family have reached such a dreadful state of things.
Dulough (or Black Lake in English) is a mock-castle on the Donegal coast, owned and loved by generations of the Campbell family, but modern incomes don't stretch to the upkeep of old family properties. In financial desperation, John decides that the way forward is to allow the government to take over running the house and open it to the public. So the family move to a small damp cottage by the lake while visitors roam round the house and grounds - not an ideal solution and strains and stresses soon begin to tell.

Black Lake is a story of loss and a family falling apart. John's decision about the future of the house, taken without consulting his wife and children, proves to be the catalyst which brings everything tumbling down. As the story is told from varying points of view, a picture is built up of what Dulough meant to each of them and of how disoriented and adrift they felt having to leave it. The one thing none of them do though is admit any of these feelings to the other family members - instead they stumble along, barely speaking to each other, holding their feelings tight inside until something is bound to snap.
Despite the idyllic setting, and the family's deep love of their home, the dark waters of the lake, the overshadowing mountains and even the valley's name - Poison Glen, an English misinterpretation of Irish - all contribute to a brooding, foreboding atmosphere at Dulough, a feeling that tragedy is just waiting to happen.


An absorbing read and one that's bound to raise thoughts about what 'home' means, and about our ties to landscape or buildings.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher -  Tinder Press
Genre - Adult fiction, literary

Buy Black Lake from Amazon

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan

review by Maryom

"My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn't yet missed a day of letting me down."

I've come to this, Donal Ryan's debut, in a round-a-bout way - back at the start of this year I received a review copy of his second novel The Thing About December which, while grim and immensely sad, immediately made its way to my 'pick of the year' list. Since then I've seen The Spinning Heart appearing here, there and everywhere on book award longlists and picking up awards, so I decided it was time to read it for myself!

The Spinning Heart is a 'slice of life' novel set in a small Irish town, exploring the financial and personal impact of the bursting of the great Irish economic bubble. To add to the general downturn in fortunes, the local get-rich-quick builder has not been bothering himself about paying tax and insurance for his employees and now, perhaps understandably, has done a runner while the town is left disfigured by his abandoned half-built housing development.
Each chapter is narrated by a different person - 21 in all - with each individual voice building towards the whole - a difficult enough task you would think for an experienced writer but this is a debut!
Reflecting life as it does, it runs through all moods and emotions - anger, pain, guilt, shame, love. At times funny, at others depressing, it builds a picture of people crushed by events beyond them, struggling to go on but still somewhere, somehow finding the strength.

I still think The Thing About December has a marginal edge over this, perhaps because I approached it 'blind', but both are amazing books full of insight and impact.

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Doubleday

Genre - adult contemporary literary fiction

Buy The Spinning Heart from Amazon

The Dead Ground by Claire McGowan

"A stolen baby. A murdered woman. A decades-old atrocity. Something connects them all..."

review by Maryom

When a new born baby goes missing from Ballyterrin hospital, everyone at first assumes that it's just a one-off incident. Then a pro-abortion campaigner goes missing and is found dead - gruesomely.  She had plenty of people who objected to what she was doing, had even received death threats, but would anyone have actually carried through on them? Could there somehow be a link between the events? With no good leads to follow the police are still stumbling in the dark when another baby is taken...and a pregnant woman goes missing. There must be a link somewhere, but where..
All these baby-related cases are a bit close to home for forensic psychologist Paula Maguire whose personal life is in turmoil with an unexpected pregnancy- and no clear cut answer to the inevitable question Who's the father? 

The Dead Ground is the second of Claire McGowan's "Paula Maguire" thrillers - set in the Northern Irish border town of Ballyterrin where Paula grew up and to which, after years in London, she's now returned as a forensic psychologist working with a special 'missing persons' unit of the local police. I really enjoyed the first of the series The Lost with a strong female lead, and police and personal plot lines that complemented each other. Happily The Dead Ground continues in this way, proving to be another excellent page-turner, even though I guessed the culprit and motive before the police team did - sometimes I wish I could just step into a book and tell the detectives who to question and what to ask!  Paula's personal life and problems again twist round the police investigation - while she tries to come to terms with her unplanned pregnancy everything at work seems centred round babies too!

 Events unfold from Paula's point of view as the investigation progresses, so there's none of the 'getting inside the killer's head' which I'm too squeamish for. Don't mistake this for cosy crime though. The story opens with a particularly disturbing scene of IRA retribution but although the violence is at times gruesome it always seems relevant and necessary to the plot - not merely thrown in gratuitously.

In Paula and the police team she works with, McGowan has created some great, realistic characters; people that I feel I'm coming to know, with their good points - and bad. I'm really enjoying this series and looking forward to the next book, to the un-folding of some of the personal plot line and, most importantly, discovering who the father of Paula's baby is!

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime

Paula Maguire Book 1; The Lost

The Thing About December by Donal Ryan

review by Maryom

 Johnsey Cunliffe has always been a bit 'slow', never as sharp-witted as the other boys and seen by all as the village idiot; gentle soul who wouldn't harm anything, incapable of fighting back, so an easy target for being mocked and bullied. His parents have always protected and sheltered him but now he's on his own and the world is a more confusing place than he'd ever imagined possible, and the mockery and taunting has turned to violence.
Since Johnsey's father's death, the family farm has been let out to a neighbouring farmer and the sheds and yards stand empty of livestock, but its value is on the increase. It lies in the centre of a potential money-making land-deal with the whole village hoping to benefit from developing it for housing and industry, but Johnsey doesn't want to give up his heritage, the only thing he has to link him to the stronger, cleverer Cunliffe men before him.
 Sorry, but this isn't the most cheerful, upbeat novel to start the year with - in fact, it's the opposite; an absolute heart-breaker of a read. Johnsey's tragedy is played out month by month, a chapter for each, and for each there's a comparison with how things were during his idyllic-seeming childhood, with life revolving around the farm and seasons, and how they are for him now. As Johnsey struggles to cope with being on his own, the reader gets to share his anguish and bewilderment - he knows he isn't as bright and quick as others but doesn't see why people think they can fool him all the time and trample all over his opinions and hopes. At times it's painful to read as the reader is more aware of the mess he's digging himself into than Johnsey is. I hoped against hope that somehow, some-way, everything would work out fine but it would have needed the waving of a magic wand. Even so the end came as a shock.
The Thing About December is a moving and immensely sad read but still compelling and one I think I'll come back to.
It's early days, but I think this will end up on my 2014's Pick of the Year.

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Doubleday

Genre - adult contemporary fiction

Buy The Thing About December from Amazon

The Lost by Claire McGowan

 review by Maryom

Paula Maguire is a forensic psychologist known among the people she works with for too much impulsiveness and a tendency to rush in when police procedures and rules would have her sit quietly in an office. Even so, her ability to get results in missing-persons cases means she's in demand. When two girls go missing within weeks of each other back in Paula's home town of Ballyterrin in Northern Ireland, she's asked to go back there to help out. For a variety of personal reasons, she isn't too keen to return to the place she left 12 years before, but grudgingly goes.
Despite the passage of time, Ballyterrin is a town still smarting from the Troubles - almost everyone seems to have lost a family member during them - but the disappearance of two schoolgirls has shocked the community.
While the police want to follow one line of enquiry, Paula's impulsive streak leads her off on her own, following tenuous links to the Mission, a religious group targeting the town's teenage girls, and trying to find a connection with disappearances back in the 1980s. Her impulsive side also comes out in her personal life - starting a relationship with one of her colleagues and re-igniting one with an old flame!
The Lost is an enjoyable, page-turner of a read - though some of the events are a little predictable, leaving the story less nail-bitingly tense than some crime novels. I'm often opposed to too much personal story-line for the characters, feeling it can get in the way of the crime-solving, but here the progress of the investigation and the revealing of Paula's personal story twist round and complement each other, helping flesh out the characters and giving a nicely balanced read. All of the characters have faults enough to make them real but are still likeable enough for the reader to care about them. Paula's problems seem far from over at the end of the novel and I was certainly left wanting to know what would happen next ...

With a strong female lead and the closeness of the personal and crime sides of the plot, it reminded me of Liza Marklund's thrillers featuring Annika Bengtzon. I hope this is the start of another such great series.


Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime

Missing Ellen by Natasha Mac a'Bhaird

review by Maryom

Ellen and Maggie have been friends since their first day at school, always there for each other, sharing everything, as close, if not closer, than sisters. But now Ellen is no longer there and Maggie is trying to make sense of what happened and of her feelings of loss and abandonment. To help her come to terms with them, she starts writing to Ellen, letters that will never be posted, but that help Maggie put into words things that she can't say to her family or friends.

Told alternately through Maggie's letters and a series of flashbacks, Missing Ellen is a story of friendship and loss. Told in the first person, it brings an immediacy to her feelings though for the sake of preserving the mystery of what has happened to Ellen, Maggie doesn't reveal everything at once.
It soon becomes apparent that Maggie and Ellen had been drifting apart for some time - while Maggie wanted to join in the school drama group, helping to make costumes, Ellen's idea of fun was getting drunk with her older boyfriend. And this was my only reservation with the book - that Maggie was a little too 'goodie goodie', Ellen so very, very bad and the moralistic attitude that if you're in the 'bad' category, then worse will befall you.
It's a great story though of friendship and growing up, and the strains that come with it. It's less cutting and not as dark as some 'real life' teen fiction so perhaps suitable for the younger end of the range and even pre-teens.

Maryom's review -  4 stars

Publisher - O'Brien Press
Genre - teen fiction, 
 

Buy Missing Ellen from Amazon

A Sixpenny Song by Jennifer Johnston

review by Maryom

When Annie's father dies she isn't exactly heart-broken, in fact mildly inconvenienced might be a better description of her feelings. With her mother having died while Annie was still a child and with breaking free from her domineering father when he refused to allow her to go to university, Annie has had nothing to tie her to home and hasn't returned in over ten years. Even so, she decides the right thing to do is head back to Dublin for her father's funeral. Back there, she discovers things aren't quite as she imagined - by leaving Annie the house where she grew up, her father seems to still be trying to direct her life, but she starts to discover that their family history was not quite as she's imagined and that maybe, just maybe, her father wasn't quite the man she'd thought he was.

A Sixpenny Song is a short but satisfying tale of family secrets that packs a bigger punch than might be expected of its size, just under 200 pages. In some ways the story is one of those 'must face the past before you can build a future' tales but not in a lazy formulaic way. The characters are real, stand-alone people, that I felt I got to know as the story, and their stories, unfolded. I loved the way it took the world as seen through Annie's childhood memories and turned it on its head. Children see the grown-up world around them from a slanted, biased stand-point; they like the people who let them do as they wish, and dislike those who try to impose order and rules. Being distanced from her father, first at boarding school then in self-imposed exile in London, Annie has had no chance to gradually revise her opinions as she's grown older - which is why so many surprises lie in wait for her back in Dublin.

A charming, engaging read, great for winter evenings.

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher -  Tinder Press
Genre - Adult fiction, literary

Buy A Sixpenny Song from Amazon

The Scattering by Jaki McCarrick

review by Maryom

The Scattering is the debut collection of short stories from Jaki McCarrick. There are 19 in all, set mainly in the border area of Eire and Northern Ireland though the location can move to London or the US, and backwards and forwards in time.
Borders of one sort or another run through a lot of the stories - between North and South, life and death, the 'real' world and the supernatural. Not firmly fixed or sharply defined borders either but shifting, ambiguous ones.

Many of the stories deal with the darker side of life - with pain and loss - which gives the collection a rather melancholy feel though with touches of dark humour.
The Past is ever present, too - sometimes in the guise of a 'golden time' from which people don't want to move on; more often in the legacy of the Troubles which still casts a shadow over people's lives.
Did I enjoy the book? I'm not sure 'enjoy' is the right word but certainly I was moved by many of the stories.
My favourite was The Tribe - in which a man travels back in time to try to prevent the destruction of Earth by Mankind. Does he succeed or is he stuck in the one of those loops that plague everyone trying to change history? It's for the reader to decide.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Seren Books
Genre - adult literary fiction, short stories

Buy  The Scattering from Amazon