An alternate history of Northern Ireland’s recent past where the last remaining residents of a haunted archipelago face imminent eviction from their home. Few and Far Between is a novel about family and memory, toxic masculinity and modern womanhood, and the legacy of trauma that offers a close look into the history of a complex place.
Few and Far Between is a novel of big emotions caught in small words, and Carson weathers the line between fiction and fact with real skill ... Few and Far Between goes beyond her earlier novels, The Raptures and The Fire Starters, by soaking such visionary zeal in the concerns of a little society lost in its own depths and soon to be inundated ... Any literature can be given a co-ordinate and bearing, and sometimes a weather. Few and Far Between has all this, and something more, which is the imprint of a disappearing world taken shape in a new ... Carson has written a novel of the larger island we all inhabit, adrift in a sea of uncertainty.
Jan Carson works a peculiar magic in her inventive novel, Few and Far Between ... The well-plotted story gains gravitas from this sweep of history, but draws its haunting strength from its characters ... In contemporary Ireland the ordinary and the mystical can coexist, and the past is ever-present. Perhaps nowhere is this truer, Carson seems to say in this masterful novel, than in the time-scarred North.
A brilliant alternate history and a cracking read ... Carson paints a vivid picture of the setting and her characters, plumbing the depths of their psyches and the collective traumas that shape them ... Between the dry humor, the family drama, and the unique island setting, Carson hits all the right notes.
