About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Clare Chambers
Rave Irish Times (IRE) Chambers’s characters are either timid, trapped by a troubled childhood, or uncertain, watching and waiting in the margins. One of the novel’s many pleasures is how convincingly unswinging 1964 is ... She writes with honesty and compassion about human experience, and the redemptive power of love and kindness.
Elif Shafak
Rave Irish Times (IRE) The risk with multiple overlapping narratives is that the reader can become more invested in one. The pace of the longer descriptive passages is slower than the character-driven sections, but no less forceful or imaginative ... This novel moves between continents, centuries, cultures and communities with intelligence and ease. Shafak raises big ideas around artefacts and ownership of cultural heritage and handles them with care ... A tribute to the power of language.
Richard Osman
Positive The Irish Independent (IRE) ... succeeds in hitting exactly the same funny, daft and warm-hearted notes as its predecessors ... The fab four each have their subplots, which are handled with insight, humour and empathy ... As with the previous two in this series, the plot is knitted in cable stitch, with lots of passing over and doubling back, but the joy of this book lies in its kind, well-observed humour, not the plot ... You get the impression Richard Osman is thoroughly enjoying himself, poking fun at his TV career.
Dean Ruxton
Positive The Irish Independent (IRE) Ruxton is aware that writing historical non-fiction has its own questions and constraints: do you stick faithfully with documented facts and avoid speculation about an individual’s thoughts or feelings? To do so is admirably accurate yet can create an exhaustingly rigid story. The Irish Times journalist has instead used his research to give voices and emotions to the humans behind the facts (which can be far more difficult with unpredictable real people than malleable fictional ones). The light touch evident in chapter titles has a podcast-like conversational quality, yet he also treats the subject of domestic abuse with care and sensitivity ... Ruxton’s painstaking and fair examination of this scandalous Victorian murder trial brings not only a fresh pair of eyes to the evidence of the day, but also a fresh approach to this tragic story.
Rachel Donohue
Positive The Irish Times (IRE) Donohue quickly tugs her story down a deeper, darker path, exploring what happens when power and jealousy go head-to-head with the complexities and extremes of teenage longing and desire ... The Temple House Vanishing opens on a significant character’s death; a brave move that pays off perfectly. From there Donohue slips back and forward, deftly folding and unfolding past and present. Occasionally the plot feels constrained by its role in this shape-shifting ... Donohue works a tight cast of characters well. The school’s nuns make their presence felt as a thunderous cloud hovering low overhead rather than as individuals ... Lavelle is referred to more than once as \'the hollow man\'. Because we encounter him only through his students’ eyes or in epigrammatic comments of his own in class, such vagueness around him is true to the story-telling but it has the effect of rendering him insubstantial, and his actions around the major incident at the heart of the novel are not entirely convincing ... Donohue is a master of clean, sharp prose, and has a hugely impressive ability to create layers of atmosphere or ratchet up tension in a couple of beguilingly simple sentences.
Richard Osman
Rave Irish Independent (IRE) The plot—essentially a cosy caper that zips nicely along from start to end—is deftly handled. However, Osman’s real genius lies in choosing such an original setting and creating such a strong and likeable cast of characters. With a light yet honest touch, Elizabeth and her crew neatly upend many stereotypical assumptions about older people. It’s such enjoyable escapism that when a visiting DCI tells Donna her boss \'couldn’t catch Covid, that one\', the reference stands out as an odd and unwanted moment of reality in an otherwise delightfully skewed alternate version of life. Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce and Ibrahim each have their own distinctive style, and Osman slips between them with ease. His compassion for his characters and swift storytelling are so beguiling that it’s easy not to notice just how skilled he is in moving from one character’s perspective to another.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Positive The Irish Times (IRE) ... [Coates] has neatly upended imagination and reality; in The Water Dancer’s magical other-history, fiction is being used to reassert, even to create, fact ... Coates is fierce and unflinching in describing the lives of the Tasked and their owners ... the novel’s biggest strength is the powerful alternative version of history it offers; one in which the Tasked dance across the water rather than drown in the waves. Where people remain alive, families stay together, and all are free to go home.