The shortlist for the Eason Book Club Novel of the Year
award shows the depth and quality of Irish fiction
By Deirdre Conroy
A wonderful way to herald the festive season is to celebrate
our home-grown literary luminaries and have all sorts of book categories and
shortlists to talk about and titles to mull over.
The Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards bring together the
entire book community - readers, authors, booksellers, publishers and
librarians. While all else around us might still be feeling the pinch of
austerity, the Irish public will always love a good book. That is what makes
these awards so special and why your vote counts.
The prestigious Novel of the Year award is sponsored by
Eason and recognises the depth and quality of Irish fiction. Previous winners
include international Man Booker Prize recipients Roddy Doyle for The Guts,
John Banville for Ancient Life and Anne Enright for The Gathering. Colum McCann
won the award in 2004 for Dancer, while Emma Donoghue won in 2010 for her
highly acclaimed Room.
Last year, Mary Costello's quietly tragic tale Academy
Street took the prize. In the past, the late John McGahern, Sebastian Barry,
Neil Jordan, Ronan Bennett and Pat McCabe have all been honoured.
This year's nominees are a satisfying shortlist including
fresh names, providing local and global narratives, all classic in their own
way. Nuala O'Connor and Kevin Barry create fictional accounts of real
characters. Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright focus on the minutiae of fractured
Irish relationships. Meanwhile, Edna O'Brien and Paul Murray tackle some
international monsters.
Tender
Belinda McKeon
Pan MacMillan/Picador
McKeon's second novel, Tender, evokes Dublin in 1998 on the
cusp of social media saturation. Set in Trinity College, in a flat on Baggot
Street and a couple of pubs, the story focuses on Catherine Reilly, who has
left her native Longford to embark on her studies in Trinity. Her friendship
with James Flynn, a gay aspiring artist, gallops into an all-consuming
obsession for her. Dark and compulsive desire is the central theme of this
pure, spare novel. The Guardian praised McKeon's "immersive, unflinching
yet humane portrait of Catherine (which) makes Tender richly nuanced and
utterly absorbing." McKeon now lives in New York.
Miss Emily
Nuala O'Connor
Sandstone Press
The enigmatic life of Emily Dickinson holds a deep fascination
for writers and readers alike. Nuala O'Connor has anglicised her name from Ni
Chonchuir for the American market and has taken on the challenge of reimagining
the reclusive poet's life through her relationship with an 18-year-old Irish
maid, Ada Concannon. Ada is from Dublin and her story is narrated in alternate
chapters, providing a lyrical counterpoint to the period tone of Dickinson's
voice. The two women find common ground through a love of nature and baking. As
the poet hardly ever left her house in Amherst, it is the two female
personalities that enrich the novel. Born in 1970, O'Connor has also published
poetry, fiction and short stories, and lives in Galway.
The Green Road
Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape
The Green Road is Enright's sixth novel. Born in 1962 in
Dublin, she won both the Novel of the Year award and the Booker Prize for The
Gathering. Enright is also our first Laureate of Irish Fiction. In The Green
Road, she continues to probe the fault lines of family life. Deeply disenchanted
characters vent their disappointment in a manner only Enright can channel.
In a tale that spans 25 years, Dan Madigan returns to his
childhood home in west Clare, travelling the eponymous Green Road which runs
through the Burren with glimpses of the Atlantic ahead. There is beauty and
darkness, hypocrisy and humility; it wouldn't be an Irish novel without them.
The Mark and The Void
Paul Murray
Hamish Hamilton
The Mark and the Void is about the financial crisis and is
Murray's third novel. Claude is a French investment banker based in Dublin.
Murray's depiction of the city is one few of us would recognise or want to
remember.
The other characters are French, German, Greek, Russian and
Australian, giving the book a sense of anywhere, except when Claude finds
himself on an unexpected journey: "And here, on the teeming road, are the
Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed,
balding, rouged, raddled, exophthalmic … " The author of Skippy Dies has
faced down the melodrama of our financial crisis and searched for meaning
beyond.
Beatlebone
Kevin Barry
Canongate
Intrigued by John Lennon's purchase in 1967 of Dorinish
Island in Clew Bay, Kevin Barry explores how the story might have played out
through the perspective of Lennon's fictitious driver, Cornelius O'Grady.
It is 1978 and Lennon, aged 37, wants to retreat to the
island, delve into his creative pool and do some primal screaming. A shaman is
needed to negotiate the strange airs of the west coast, and O'Grady obliges.
Car and boat journeys around Mulranny and Newport nurture
the psychedelic mythology. Lennon's mythic quest through the doors of
perception define this book, which was making waves before it went on sale.
The Little Red Chairs
Edna O'Brien
Faber & Faber
Edna O'Brien, the doyenne of Irish writing, published her
24th novel, The Little Red Chairs, this year. Evidently based on Radovan
Karadzic ("the Butcher of Bosnia"), a dark stranger comes to the fictional
town of Cloonoila.
Dr Vladimir Dragan is ostensibly a healer and sex therapist
from Montenegro. The local beauty, Fidelma, seeks help with fertility problems
and falls in love with the mysterious Balkan.
But Vlad is a Serbian war criminal and his unveiling has
global significance together with horrific consequences for Fidelma. O'Brien
confronts evil head on, and typically shines a spotlight on an Irish rural
community that punishes a woman who has broken the tribal rules.
The Sunday Times praised The Little Red Chairs as "a
timely and defiant book".
To vote please visit www.irishbookawards.ie Voting ends the 19th at midnight. One vote per email address.
No comments:
Post a Comment