RaveThe Irish Independent (IRE)Ryan specialises in excavating rural and small-town Ireland, uncovering his characters\' particularities - their alienation and urge to belong, their capacity for self-deception and love - in piercing, lyrical prose ... Ryan is excellent at dealing with the passage of time; key scenes unfold slowly, years are covered in a few sentences. The effect of this is subtle but consistent, a reminder that individual lives are rich and transient. Like John McGahern\'s That They May Face the Rising Sun, the novel captures the steadiness and flux of life in rural Ireland - the stories in between the silences, the coexistence of beauty and violence, kindness and cruelty ... Moll remains elusive - less a fully embodied woman than a catalyst for the transformation of those around her. Ryan is particularly discerning when he is inside the heads of Paddy and Kit, who allow him to expose the class and power systems at play in the village ... While Alexander\'s perspective on his adopted country - wry, bemused, ultimately fond - is part of Strange Flowers\' appeal, Josh\'s whiteness - not impossible but highly improbable - is a stumbling block. When he and Kit first see Josh, Paddy refers to \'the perfect, unblemished whiteness of this strange flower\'. But Ryan doesn\'t really use Josh\'s whiteness to elaborate on the novel\'s themes; instead it\'s a distraction, foregrounded without being fully worked in ... Ryan\'s prose is as beautiful and haunting as ever ... In rethinking the parable of the prodigal son, in looking at what happens when a prodigal returns, Ryan creates an expansive and thought-provoking story that is timeless and fresh. It may begin in the 1970s, but Strange Flowers holds a mirror up to racism in Ireland today.
Sarah Crossan
PositiveThe Independent (IRE)From the opening stanzas of Here is the Beehive it\'s clear that Crossan understands the level of distillation that verse requires. Her protagonist\'s voice is immediate and distinctive. Within a few pages - using very few words - she establishes the backstory and plot ... Addressing Connor directly in the second person, she is also, of course, talking to herself, so her digressions and splintered memories make perfect sense. It can feel subversive, transgressive even, when she gives voice to the darkest parts of her psyche ... Crossan writes in snapshots, paring Here is the Beehive down to its essentials. While this creates momentum it also means that certain characters and relationships are underdeveloped...Rebecca remains elusive, refracted through the prism of Ana\'s jealousy and hurt ... Although Ana\'s mental health is faltering, there is a suddenness to some of her more unhinged behaviour that feels out of step with the rest of the novel ... There are difficulties too with some of Crossan\'s stylistic choices. Her use of one- and two-word lines can give individual words and phrases an emphasis they don\'t necessarily merit. Clipped lines and sentence fragments cut up the text, drawing attention to themselves and the form, interrupting the narrative ... The fragmentation reflects Ana\'s fragmenting mind but the reader is frequently invited to pause or to linger on lines that might fit better within a body of text ... Despite this, Here is the Beehive generates its own momentum. Its core strength is its depiction of an imperfect mother and wife, defying traditional expectations of women while wrestling with her own self-sabotaging behaviour; Ana delays mentioning her children for so long that when she eventually references them it is unclear who they are ... a distorted love poem as well as the story of a woman finally confronting herself.
Brit Bennett
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Among Brit Bennett’s gifts as a writer is her control of narrative time ... Intimate and expansive, gripping and carefully crafted, the single, mesmerising sentence hints at what’s to come ... Bennett’s flair for multiple narratives, her powerful depiction of trauma and focus on how the past continues to reverberate, also bring Morrison to mind ... Bennett avoids cliche and melodrama ... Rather than judging Stella, Bennett scrutinises her, using passing as a prism through which to examine the impact of racism and colourism on individual and collective identities. It also allows her to expose white privilege and the futility of self-serving white guilt ... Bennett is an excellent storyteller, though some of her secondary characters – a white academic blind to how white and middle class her version of feminism is – are overshadowed by the plot and can feel like plants. But the novel is driven by the intelligence and agility of her writing, which is tender without being sentimental, and stark when it needs to be. The violence is indelible, the twins’ complicated bond beautifully real.
James Meek
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)...the novel is at its most current, and initially most convoluted, in its exploration of gender identity ... It’s fascinating and eye-opening on many levels ... Meek is more overtly concerned with holding a mirror up to today than Hilary Mantel in her Thomas Cromwell novels and he lacks Mantel’s lightness of touch, the playfulness and drive of his narrative obscured by its disquisitions and conscious literariness ... While his erudition and research are almost too clear, his prose is often brilliantly fresh ... To Calais, in Ordinary Time is at its best and most immediate when the characters are allowed free rein ... the novel...may be a feat of imagination but is strained by over-intricacy.
Julia Armfield
RaveThe Irish TimesArmfield’s fictions are set on...thinner surfaces, unstable places where boundaries – between humans and animals, wakefulness and sleep, land and sea – are prone to weaken or disappear. Grounded in the everyday, the stories borrow from myth and Gothic literature, their familiarity upended by elements of the uncanny and macabre. Bodies are sites of transformation; they can metamorphose, turn to stone or rise from the dead with tendons exposed and skin coming away from the bone ... Armfield...pays as much attention to her sentences as she does to her plots, shifting or consolidating meaning with the use of a single word. Her writing is impeccably honed, full of juxtapositions and qualifications that help to create a creeping sense of unease ... Tapping into the darkness of the contemporary world, she brings to mind other young British writers like Sophie Mackintosh but her fantasies have a precision and surreality of their own ... Women have animal as well as human natures here; they can be difficult and vengeful and across the collection the male body count is high ... a bold and timely collection that skews unpalatable truths in order to see them afresh.
George Saunders, Illustrated by Chelsea Cardinal
PositiveThe IndependentParticularly fans of Saunders\' short fiction, will appreciate the voice, wit and balance of darkness and light ... The social commentary might seem blatant but power is a dominant theme in fables and like George Orwell\'s Animal Farm, Fox 8 makes no apologies for being a morality tale. And as well as being a warning about unchecked consumerism and development, it\'s also subtle, satiric and, as is so often the case with Saunders, beautifully compassionate ...In the hands of a lesser writer, the phonetically spelled words throughout the book might seem cutsie or annoying, but Saunders includes just the right amount - not enough to disrupt the reading experience but enough to ensure they are intrinsic to the narrative voice.
