My urban upbringing was as far removed from the land as it’s possible to be. I once told a girl my age that milk came from cows, only to be ordered by her mother to say it came out of a milk bottle and not from a cow at all, otherwise there’d be war over the breakfast table. We were ten years old at the time and knew next to nothing of how our food was produced. Farmers, now as …
Category: Fiction
June 16th. Another cloudless summer day. The RTE Six O’Clock News finishes with a montage of boater hats, round spectacles, moustaches and parasols. Colourful crowds gather each side of the …
Sally Rooney’s excellent novel Normal People has shown us what friendship, romance, and growing-up really looks like in all it’s ugly raw reality. Once the brilliant TV series also finished, I …
My male friends and family members are some of the most intelligent people I know. Alert, interested, perceptive, their natural curiosity about the world far exceeds my own. I defer …
My book is coming out in the time of coronavirus. This doesn’t bother me as much as you might expect, but it does, perhaps, somewhat date its treatment of the …
Between 2016-2020, there have been three bicentenaries celebrating the lives of the Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne. Even if you don’t recognise their names it is unlikely that you …
Few of us could have imagined the kind of world in which we find ourselves, with all the old certainties blown over like the seeds of a dancing dandelion. Life …
Virginia Woolf is one of those authors who, unfortunately, has a reputation for intimidating readers. Having been a massive fan of her since I was a teenager, I thought I …
One of my favourite aspects of children’s literature is the way that the unbelievable and impossible become believable and possible. Take for example The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh …
Of course there are plenty of books I have never read, but the ones staring down from my bookshelves really bug me. At some stage I paid good money for …
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