 |
| BiP staff review by Leonie |
by Sebastian Barry
May 2014 | Allen & Unwin | $29.99pb
This is such a sad tale, but it is brought to life by Sebastian Barry’s wonderful way with words. Please read this book: it is something special.
Sometimes you just know a book is by an Irish writer after reading two paragraphs. Sebastian Barry is one of those writers who manage to bring a touch of magic to the darkest of subjects. Jack McNulty, an ordinary young man from Sligo, meets the love of his life, Mai Kirwan, when they are both students at Galway University. Although she is way out of his league, Jack pursues Mai until she finally agrees to marry him, following the death of her beloved father. They spend the first months of their marriage in Africa, where Jack has an engineering job on a colonial outpost. Life is good as Mai heads back to Ireland for the birth of their first child. When the Second World War intervenes Jack accepts a temporary commission as an officer in the British army for the duration of the war. While he is away Mai is overcome by deep depression, which she tries to cover up. The history of the young McNultys is told by Jack, now living in Accra in 1957, as he writes his journal. He is full of remorse for the way he has lived his life and the way he treated his wife and two daughters. Jack managed to fritter away all of Mai’s inheritance, including her family home, through heavy drinking and gambling. Mai fell even further into post-natal depression after the birth of their second daughter, resorting to the gin bottle to help her survive.
This is such a sad tale, but it is brought to life by Sebastian Barry’s wonderful way with words. Please read this book: it is something special.
 |
| Recommended by Chris |
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
May 2014 | Forth Estate | $29.99pb
by Anthony Doerr
May 2014 | Forth Estate | $29.99pb
In 1934 Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind. Her father builds her a model of their neighbourhood so she can memorize every house, every street with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler’s empire to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Anthony Doerr illuminates the ways in which, against all odds, that people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
 |
| BiP staff review by Sue |
The Arsonist
by Sue Miller
by Sue Miller
July 2014 | Bloomsbury | $29.99pb
Set in the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy, Sue Miller’s new novel examines what the notion of ‘home’ means to us. Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for fifteen years, Frankie Rowley returns to Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always spent the summer. On her first night back a house up the road burns down. Over the weeks that follow, as her father declines into dementia and her mother becomes more desperate, another house burns, and then another. Each of Miller’s characters is struggling to shape a comfortable, safe place to call home, and this endeavour is made even more precarious by the activity of the arsonist in their midst. Tensions and suspicions run high in the collective effort to defuse this threat, while the day-to-day lives of the individual characters provide a poignant counterpoint via their own drama. It’s not hard to get behind this book – great writing and an intriguing story. Sure to please fans of Marilyn Robinson.
>> Read the first chapter
