Top picks for leafing through this autumn
The mornings are cold now, the nights are closing in and it’s a perfect time to invest in a good read. Here are my top picks for the season so far.
Fans of mystery, crime and noir will hoover up Lynda La Plante’s latest Jane Tennison novel, Taste of Blood (Zaffre). Jane’s requested transfer to a quieter station leaves her disquieted, until a domestic assault case opens up a massive Pandora’s box.
Murder on Achill Island has Garda detective Lucy Golden revisit her schooldays in Martina Murphy’s The Reckoning (Constable), as the murder victim is a sister of one of Lucy’s old schoolpals.
CM Ewan’s The House Hunt (Macmillan), already optioned for TV although just published, features a young couple selling their house who find themselves in a nightmare, thanks to the viewer from hell.
Amanda Cassidy’s The Returned (Canelo Press) starts with a house fire in which a little boy disappeared. Now he’s back. Six years later.
Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha (Scribner) is a dystopian thriller exploring social inequalities in South Korea, as Jin-keung is forced to investigate the sudden disappearance of her brother.
A remote Cornish mansion is the scene for Lizzy Barber’s Nanny Wanted (Macmillan), a slice of domestic noir a la Daphne du Maurier. Why won’t anyone in the Rowe family tell the new nanny about the old one?
For historical fiction fans, there’s the sweeping Fayne (Tramp Press) by Ann-Marie Macdonald, an extravagant tome of a book set in the 19th century on the Scottish border, exploring themes of land, power and buried family secrets.
Secrets are also the stuff of Pam Lecky’s The Last Letter from London (Avon). Set in WWII, it follows MI5 agent Sarah Gillespie, charged with handling the demands of a French double agent who’s got a dangerous agenda of her own.
Gareth Rubin’s The Turnglass (Simon and Schuster) is a super-clever tête-bêche book (two stories, back-to-back and upside-down) featuring two family sagas, one in Essex in the 1880s and the other in 1930s California, both inexorably intertwined. The ink’s hardly dry on this one and it’s soaring.
If fantasy fiction is your thing, here’s one from an unlikely source. John Connolly is renowned for his Charlie Parker bestsellers, but in The Land of Lost Things (Hodder and Stoughton) he has distraught mother, Ceres, reading to her comatose little girl in hospital. Ceres is drawn to an old house on the hospital grounds where something mysterious awaits her.
Two outstanding short story anthologies have been recently published. Miss Kim Knows by Cho Nam-Joo (Scribner), who’s already been mentioned, is an anthology with universal themes, though firmly rooted in South Korea. Nam-Joo covers misogyny, gender-based violence, family responsibility, love, loss and yearning in these slim little tales.
And while she explores the world of disconnected females, it’s disconnected males that populate the five stories in Thomas Morris’s Open Up (Faber), including a pregnant male seahorse, in beautiful prose where the leitmotif is the longing to belong.
For fans of memoir, Molly Hennigan’s The Celestial Realm (Eriu) is a disturbing but eloquently-told story of the author’s relationship with her grandmother, who spent most of her life incarcerated in mental hospitals.
Françoise Malby-Anthony’s The Elephants of Thula-Thula (Pan) is an updated account of daily life in the author’s elephant reserve that she founded with her late husband.
Miriam Mulcahy’s This is My Sea (Eriu) recounts the author’s discovery of sea swimming as a restorative salve for her emotional pain, after losing three family members in a short space of time.
Memories rather than memoir are the stuffing for Kevin C Kearns’s A Year of Glory and Gold; 1932 – Ireland’s Jazz Age (Gill) as Kearns walks us through the year of the Eucharistic Congress and the sudden proliferation of flappers dancing to The Devil’s Music instead of comely maidens dancing reels at various crossroads. An entertaining slice of Irish history you won’t find on the Leaving Cert syllabus.
An important message for Mná na hÉireann: Aisling is back! Aisling Ever After by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen (Gill) sees Aisling’s old flame travel to New York where she now lives, determined to lure her back to the oul sod.
Annie West’s The Late Night Writers Club (New Island) is a delightful, highly original graphic novel featuring a young debut author, struck by writer’s block, who finds himself locked in the National Library and calling on our great literary heroes for assistance. But be careful what you wish for.
Alexandra Potter’s More Confessions of a Forty-Something F##k-Up (Macmillan) has Nell Stevens continuing the struggle through her messy, woebegone life, but with plenty of laughs along the way.
In his second darkly comic novel, Patrick Osborne’s When Your Number’s Up (Orla Kelly) follows a madcap caper to steal a lotto machine and play it for free. Forever. But nothing’s for free or forever.
Fans of contemporary poetry can’t go wrong with multi-award-winning poet Greg Delanty’s The Professor of Forgetting (LSUP), a mixed bag of musings on everything from global warming and ageing, to bereavement, potatoes, magpies and his beloved hometown of Cork.
I’m not fond of the term ‘literary fiction’ but I don’t make the rules, so here are my ‘lit fic’ favourites. Noel O’Regan’s Though the Bodies May Fall (Granta) is absolutely outstanding and tells the story of Micheál, living alone in the family home on Kerry Head, attempting to save the lives of those intent on jumping from the nearby cliffs. A stunning debut.
Neil Jordan’s The Well of Saint Nobody (Head of Zeus) involves two former concert pianists and an invented holy well with healing powers, nestled in a quiet Cork village. Vintage Jordan fiction.
Rachel Connolly’s Lazy City (Canongate) follows Erin’s return to Belfast from London, following the death of her best friend. Erin’s own life is to take a nosedive from here on in. Another impressive debut.
Finally, Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day (Faber) is a very short story, not even a novelette, about a cancelled wedding day. Or at least that’s how it appears. But in the simplest and sparest of prose, Keegan explores a vast snake pit of misogyny in all its forms, as Cathal leaves work early on a fine summer’s Friday evening, wondering what to do with himself on the weekend he was supposed to be wed. A devastating, tiny work of enormous magnitude.
Happy reading!