BOOK NEWS
Children's Book Festival 2008
The Children’s Book Festival 2008 will run throughout the month of October, with over 1,500 events expected to take place nationwide to celebrate children’s books and encourage reading amongst children and teenagers...
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Entries due for MS READaTHON
The sign-up period for the annual sponsored MS READaTHON starts on September 1, with the reading period for children taking part running from October 17 to November 17...
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Radio programme features women writers
"Women and Words", a six-part series celebrating women writers, is currently airing on RTE Lyric FM...
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Cork-based author to read for Western Writers' Centre
Novelist and journalist Alannah Hopkin will read from her work for the Western Writers' Centre in The Imperial Hotel in Galway on Friday September 12...
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New book on Protestant missions in Connemara
A new book, "Soupers and Jumpers, The Protestant Missions in Connemara,
1848 to 1937", written by Mayo author Miriam Moffitt, will be launched
by Minister Éamon Ó Cúiv in Foyle's Hotel Clifden on September 6.
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"Murals of Derry" updated
Guildhall Press has launched its new photographic publication, "Murals of Derry", an updated and revised version of its 1995 publication "Seeing is Believing?".
Other newly published books not featured in the review:
"Connemara - The Last Pool of Darkness - Tim Robinson
(ISBN 978-1-844-88155-0)
"Three Kings" - Cork, Kilkenny, Tipperary - Ralph Riegel
(ISBN 978-1-84717-102-3)
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BOOK OF THE MONTH
The Silence of the Glasshouse - Martin Malone
"The Silence of the Glasshouse" is a disturbing account of a period in Ireland's history that left a legacy of division in communities and in families.
Centred on County Kildare and based on true events during the Civil War, Martin Malone's latest novel is a powerful portrayal of the bitterness, the fear, the idealism and the brutality of those caught up in the Civil War in 1922. On December 19 in that year seven men were executed in Curragh Prison after being found in possession of guns and ammunition. Martin Malone has applied an interesting structure to the narrative, with events related by Chalky White, one of those sentenced, his mother Breege, prison chaplain Father Pat Donnelly, and Kearney, the Free State Army officer who enforced the executions. Thus the author is able to enter the minds of each character and reveal the motives for their actions, the emotions experienced as the story unfolds, and the interplay of mother and son, priest and penitent, Free Stater and Irregular.
For the eighteen-year-old fatherless Chalky, the decision to join the Irregulars was "more an indecision and yet this too was a decision, to see how things go". He and six comrades have carried out a series of attacks on the railway and on army personnel, and when they are eventually caught two of their number are not with them and thus evade detention. Although the official line was that the men and their safe house had been picked out by the light of the water tower at Curragh Camp, it was believed locally that at least one of those two men who escaped detectioin had turned informer. The author has taken some liberties with his story; in real life it was Stephen "Chalky" White's mother who had died and his last letter was addressed to his father. That there were atrocities on both sides is not in dispute, and the story opens with the murder of Lt. John Wogan Browne. Anger at his death is at the heart of the merciless behaviour of Kearney, compounded by the brutal murder of his own brother by opponents of the Treaty.
In "The Silence of the Glasshouse" Martin Malone has introduced to a new generation the divisions generated by the Civil War, the ease with which young men can be caught up in dangerous situations and the feelings of helplessness experienced by those close to them. There is a strong sense of the waste of young lives, of injustice when a similar case in Kerry saw the death sentences on four men rescinded, and of the wonderful mixture of devotion and pragmatism embodied in the character of Chalky's mother, Breege. This is a fascinating story skilfully told.
(New Island, ISBN 978-1-84840-001-6, pp255, €11.95)
Martin Malone is a novelist and short story writer living in Co. KIldare. He won the John B. Keane/Sunday Independent Literary Award and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is a columnist with the Leinster Leader.
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Bestsellers
List - August 2008
Paperback Fiction
1. No Time for Goodbye, Linwood Barclay - Orion
2. The Deportees, Roddy Doyle - Vintage
3. Goodnight, Beautiful, Dorothy Koomson - Sphere
4. Where the Heart Is, Mairead O'Driscoll - Poolbeg
5. Glitz, Louise Bagshawe - Headline
Paperback Non-fiction
1. Angels in My Hair, Lorna Byrne - Century
2. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert - Bloomsbury
3. My Booky Wook, Russell Brand - Hodder
4. Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, Martha Long - Mainstream
5. The Chairman of the Boards: No 1, Eamonn Coughlan - Red Rock
Hardback Fiction
1. Someone Special, Sheila O'Flanagan - Headline
2. Saving Grace, Ciara Geraghty - Hodder Headline Ireland
3. This Charming Man, Marian Keyes - Michael Joseph
4. Do You Want to Know a Secret? Claudia Carroll - Transworld Ireland
5. Between the Sheets, Colette Caddle - Simon & Schuster
Hardback Non-fiction
1. The Secret, Rhonda Byrne - Simon & Schuster
2. Irish History: Minipedia, Seamus MacAnnaid - Parragon
3. Munster: Champions of Europe, Irish Examiner - Gill & Macmillan
4. Your 15th Club, Bot Rotella - Simon & Schuster
5. Life with My Sister Madonna, Christopher Ciccone and Wen Leigh - Simon & Schuster
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BOOK REVIEWS
A Dance in Time - Orna Ross
 Two sets of mothers and daughters, one real and the other fictional,
set almost a century apart form the basis for this second novel by Orna
Ross. And at more than six hundred pages this is not pool-side book,
but a book to be read with attention and savoured. Iseult (Izzy)
Mulcahy lives with her daughter Maya, known as Star, in California.
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Sleep Softly Baby - Carol Magill
 A most unpromising start almost led me to abandon this book, but what
appeared to be a run-of-the-mill story about a girl from the provinces
making it big in Dublin turned into a psychological thriller that
succeeded in capturing the attention.
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Na Comharsana Nua - Éamonn Ó Loingsigh (Reviewed by Máire Ní Fhearaigh)
In this new novel for learners of Irish, Éamonn Ó Loingsigh tells the story of Liam and Siobhán Ó Maoilmhín, a young couple recently returned home to Galway from America.
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Hope in New York City - Cynthia G. Neale
Cynthia G. Neale's sequel to "The Irish Dresser" continues to capture
the hopes and disappointments of the McCabe family, who escaped to
America from the ravages of the Great Hunger.
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Finding Your Chicago Irish - Sharon Shea Bossard
The author of "Finding My Irish", chronicling her search for the story
of her grandparents' emigration from Ireland to America, Sharon Shea
Bossard has now acceded to a request from her publisher to write a
guide to Irish Chicago.
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Lord of the Rams - Ronan Smith
Subtitled "The Greatest Story Never Told", this could be a very
irritating book if penned by someone less well able to distance himself
from his own story.
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Little Croker - Joe O'Brien
For any youngster keen on Gaelic football, Joe O'Brien's first venture
into writing for slightly older children will be instantly appealing.
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In the Bestsellers but not reviewed:
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The Poison Throne - Celine Kiernan
Although written for young adult readers Celine Kiernan's first novel will, I am sure, enjoy a much wider readership.
The first of "The Moorehawke Trilogy", it tells the tale of a young girl and her father and their attempts to lead a normal, and safe, life in a fourteenth century kingdom set somewhere in southern Europe. The characters are few, but they are drawn with such exactitude, with such sympathy for their predicaments, that they linger on in the reader's mind when the final chapter has been read.
Wynter Moorehawke and her father Lorcan, both carpenters, have arrived back at the court of King Jonathon to find it a changed place, a place of intrigue and torture. The bond between father and daughter is established with sentiment but without sentimentality, and the detail of the day-to-day lives of the young girl and her ailing father reveal an amount of research on the part of the author. The apprentice system is fully explained not in dry paragraphs but by describing Wynter's first encounter with apprentice carpenters whom she must direct. The food eaten, the clothes and social customs and the hierarchical nature of court life are described so vividly that they become a history lesson of themselves.
However the author has also dwelt at length on the violence inherent in fourteenth century life, the guilt by association, the terrible tortures and beatings, but all are slotted into a plot that is almost entirely credible; even the talking cat and the ghosts become perfectly acceptable under Ms Kiernan's treatment. The dichotomy of the king's character, which has seen him almost destroy both of his sons, is the catalyst for the unfolding events, with the heir Alberon having disappeared totally and Razi forced reluctantly into his place. Add the character of Christopher Garron, introduced to the court by Razi and used by both King Jonathon and Razi to secure their own ends, and the mysterious "Bloody Machine", engineered by Lorcan when he was seventeen but now in the hands of the lost heir Alberon, and the stage is set for the continuing development of this most absorbing chronicle. With "The Poison Throne" not due for publication until October, I trust it will not be too long before Book II, "The Crowded Shadows", becomes available.
(O'Brien Press, ISBN 978-1-84717-110-8, pp368, €12.99)
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