Carr’s beautiful and beguiling debut offers many delights. The characters live and breathe on the page. Masterful depictions of hardscrabble existences on land and perilous escapades at sea are offset with moments of wry humor ... A novel that will bewitch many readers.
Inventive and ambitious ... Offhandedly manages in two hundred pages to be at least four books in one. It’s a single-generation family saga that is comprehensively insightful despite being dazzlingly compact.
That unusual thing, a novel that gathers its predecessors in altered context. It is northern writing in the broadest sense ... Carr draws the local characters and their quirks with an affectionate humour that carries the novel through its various devastations ... Beautifully observed ... Wry, observant, various and thoughtful, a book that gathers momentum like a westerly, the crash of consequences giving way to a late calm, the reader left with a stunned impression of the storm that just blew over, Donegal returned to its big, open sky.
Begins in an accomplished storyteller’s hypnotic style ... This is a surprising, tender and warm-hearted novel about a real place and real people: a gentle gift for spring.
Warm, funny, full of lightly worn wisdom and wit. In short, it is a joy ... Not perfect. The plot meanders at times and there is little sense of climax — it begins, things happen and then it ends ... Perhaps the meandering is the point ... This is no tightly plotted mystery, but a vivid, loving and genuinely funny tribute to a people and place that is slowly, tragically vanishing.
