RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)There are faint echoes of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: a close-knit group of students become increasingly absorbed by esoteric ideas that reshape their understanding of the world ... Maclean expands his novel into stranger territory ... Draws confidently on Gothic traditions while incorporating elements of folk horror and speculative fiction ... Although it runs to more than 500 pages, Solace House sustains its atmosphere with remarkable consistency. Thoughtful, unsettling and ambitious, it is less interested in delivering conventional scares than in evoking a slow, disorientating collapse of reality itself.
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Carries a deep sense of place and a reverence for ordinary people living close to the land ... The setting is rendered with extraordinary care ... Stedman has a real gift for description, and her prose anchors the story firmly in place ... Remarkably, this is only Stedman’s second novel, though it reads with the assurance of a much more experienced writer ... There are moments where the plot takes somewhat incongruous turns, and a few resolutions feel tidier than real life might allow. The pacing is also a little slow in places ... Ultimately, this is an uplifting, moving and utterly absorbing novel.
RaveIrish Times (IRE)The narrative is ragged and deliberately unstructured, but Freud’s control is masterful. Her prose is lucid, effortless and evocative. It captures the slippery, often conflicting nature of memory and the subtle devastation of unresolved family wounds ... A breathless description of missed connections and half-remembered moments. Like memory itself, it is fractured. And like memory, it lingers long after the last line.
