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.

Sea of Tranqility : Emily St John Mandel

In Sea of Tranquillity Emily St John Mandel returns to old themes; pandemics, as in Station Eleven, and Ponzi schemes, as in The Glass Hotel. But here we also have shifts in time from 1912 to 2401 during which a main character appears in various guises.