RaveIrish Times (IRE)Barry is a master of loose talk and wild ideas ... Barry has written a vaudeville masterpiece, gaudy, ragged and irrepressible ... Barry’s sympathies are by turns comic and scarifying, the balance between which sets the novel’s tone at large ... Her worn quietude is the novel’s steady centre and the sign of what Barry’s scouring prose sometimes hides, which is the emotional range of his stories and his care for quiet in the chaos. For all its palpitations, The Heart in Winter has a persistent rhythm that is sign of a style to come, no matter how bitter the weather.
Louise Kennedy
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Trespasses is a troubled fiction, intimate, observant and ironic. It is sensual too, and tragic, taut and unsparing of the binds that once held this fractured society in place ... Trespasses refuses false comfort ... Throughout, Kennedy writes with fierce power; Trespassesis a prose machine that tests apparent forms of sincerity against the single principle of human solidarity ... Kennedy writes this tangled world with unusual clarity, her tenderly sharpened prose open to feelings so presently intimate that her sentences take shape like a body beside you ... Read this novel for what it is, and not for the past in which it is set. Insightful, humane and utterly determined to find its own freedoms, Trespasses is a bright flare of energy and wit, Kennedy a writer of exceptional empathy, style and skill.
John McGahern, ed. Frank Shovlin
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)His letters to Monteith are one of the book’s many riches, and point to unexpected coordinates for the life and the work ... The interweaving links between the fiction, the life and the society remain partly obscure in the letters, in large part because McGahern chose it to be so, investing his self in his art, and in chosen company. For this we badly need a biography that further describes more of McGahern’s social and literary life ... Adamantine and unrelenting, McGahern’s view of art was uncompromising, as expressed in the letters to Colm Tóibín, which delineate sharply between what McGahern approved of and what he did not. There is warmth in the letters to Caroline Walsh, who we all miss, Belinda McKeon and others. Some suffer severely, and the passages that describe McGahern’s relationship with Richard Murphy are provocative, not least when he comments on Murphy’s private life in Sri Lanka ... In contrast, the advice to Tóibín was well given, and taken, and such exchanges point to the depth of feeling that McGahern inspired in others. This is true most of all in his correspondence with Madeline, and in his reports of their comings and goings to friends and contemporaries. If the early letters are the trying on of masks, the later letters after their marriage are a slow and steady release of the tensions that marked both their family upbringings, and a testament to the balance the two found together ... That spirit animates McGahern’s letters in magnificent style, and all credit to Shovlin, and to Faber, for bringing the artist, neighbour, friend and lover to such brilliant, refracted light.
