Neil Jordan : The Well of Saint Nobody

How could I resist this book when I read it is about a pianist who is afflicted with psoriatic arthritis in his hands and can no longer play? And also, about a more humble pianist, a woman, who has been told her hands are ‘too small’. What can she do but become a piano teacher?

Maylis Besserie : Scattered Love

Maylis Besserie’s first novel based on the life of Samuel Beckett was awarded the Prix Goncourt. She is fortunate to have as her translator Clíona Ní Ríordáin, a lecturer in Irish Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Set in the nursing home, the Résidence Tier Temps, where Beckett spent the last few months of his life, her book was an elegant and compassionate account of Beckett’s life and work. The only fault I could find with it was the English title Yell, Sam, If You Still Can; why not call the The Third Age, as in the original French?

cacophony of bone : kerri ni dochtairgh

kerri ni dochartaigh’s second book joins the rising pile of pandemic books. Her first book, Thin Places, a memoir of growing up in Derry, made the short list for the Wainwright Prize. I selected this one because I thought it was in my chosen ‘women alone’ genre. It proved to be a tale of her move to a ramshackle railway cottage in a remote part of Southern Ireland. But not alone. She was with the person she names as her ‘lover’ M. But M spends most of his time working around the land and building furniture out of abandoned wood. So, as much as the woman who goes to live with the nuns in Charlotte Wood’s book, she is on her own.

Anne Enright : The Wren, The Wren

In a June edition of The London Review of Books I came upon six poems by an Irish poet I didn’t know. Philip McDaragh certainly sounded Irish, and two of the poems were translated from Irish of the 12th and 9th Century respectively. I had always loved the Irish air, Lagan Love, and one little poem was called The Bird of Lagan Lough.

the wee bird,

yellow-beaked,

blurting sweet

melody over

grey water

is a blackbird

hidden in gorse

(yellow, of course)

Paul Murray: The Bee Sting

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is his fourth novel, and like An Evening of Long Goodbyes, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. He is an Irish writer, and like many other Irish writers, writes about the family and the state of Ireland, or, as here, lets the despair and break-down of family life, speak for life in Ireland and in the wider world.