PRESTIGE DRAMA, debut novel from a stellar storyteller

PRESTIGE DRAMA
SÉMAS O'REILLY
Grand Central Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Derry is already abuzz with news that famous American actor, Monica Logue, has flown to the city and will be starring in a new series set during the Troubles. And then she goes missing...

All eyes are on Diarmuid, the flaky scriptwriter who was the last to see Monica alive. From budding young actors hoping for a role to grieving parent whose story forms the backbone of the narrative; newspaper editors covering the mystery to taxi drivers hearing all the news from their clients, The Dogs in the Street follows the city's cast as they all try to locate themselves in Monica's disappearance.

Séamas O'Reilly's debut novel is a comedy about dramatising tragedy, and the responsibilities of a teller to a tale. It brings to life the voices of a city, the people, families and communities who find themselves obsessed with, and terrified of, interrogating their past.

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My Review: Author of the poignant, hilarious memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? delivers a novel of The Troubles™...this seems to be a rite of passage for Irish writers born after 1950...via a lens I found mostly successful. A TV production hub in factual reality, Northern Ireland was a violent and terrifying place not that long ago. A multi-part limited series being made there is a welcome boost to the economy, and to the good image the country badly needs to project into the world.

But a film being made about The Troubles™ is a different proposition altogether. That topic is quite sensitive. So when Monica Logue starts researching her starring role in this prestige drama, the mere act of talking to people about the past..."How do you talk about the past as a person still living it, in a place that barely survived it?" the author has a character muse...sets off explosions of the same emotions that threatened to destroy the societal fabric of the place. Is it any wonder she just vanishes? The real question is "how." Did she run away from threats and intimidation, was she kidnapped by people she frightened with her research, was this another ugly political assassination to silence a voice digging in dirt some powerful people buried bodies in?

A very short read of under 200pp ought not to offer satisfying conclusions to these questions, that's just too little space. "Hold my beer" says Author Séamas, and delivers a series of tight storytelling-heavy chapters from multiple points of view. The only one you see more than once is, unsurprisingly, Diarmuid the writer of the television series. Each of them flows into the next, not always seamlessly, but that did not jar me out of the narrative flow. All the chapters are, as mentioned, storytelling-heavy...focused on making your idea of what's happening in that moment illuminate the journey to the resolution of the plot.

As a debut novel, this is the cream of the crop. Author Séamas is an experienced storyteller, his writing-craft chops are well-exercised from prior work done. In the places I was less that ecstatic, it was down to my feelings about the choice he made to have the novel mirror a screenplay in its tightness, its use of the delightful discursiveness of his characters mainly in dialogue. I'd've enjoyed more "Irishness" throughout. I found his memoir so very delighful because it had observations expressed in the same voice as the dialogue. That, of course, works better in personal and factual contexts. It adds distance in that setting, allowing truly horrendously painful memories to be seen as past, not immediate and awful...which is why I found their relative absence odd here.

I'm in no way trying to put you off the read, please understand that. It was a delight, well mostly a delight to learn why Monica was treated as she was. I want the pleasures of this read to be the main take-away you have for this story. I have a minor few cavils, none of which made me think I should move on to the next DRC on the Kindle.

A debut novel from a stellar storyteller that's a treasure of time to read.

HEART, BE AT PEACE gave me agita

HEART, BE AT PEACE
DONAL RYAN
Viking Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them

“I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise…”

In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the the jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold.

But a new, insidious menace creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of this community. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this small town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way.

A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to weather the storm of betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, towns, and entire generations.

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My Review: I got a copy of Steerforth Press's hardover of Author Ryan's debut, The Spinning Heart, years ago. I was not a fan. It felt to me like a lightened up, shallowed out, misery porn oratorio. This novel-in-stories (though Viking would not like that description, stories being anathema on the US market) is the thematic and setting follow-on to the first book. It isn't really a sequel because it makes perfect sense, nuance and all, to someone who has never read the first book.

It is, I'm unsurprised to say, written in the same style as the first book, and that is not greatly to my taste. It's not incompetent, or poor, or clumsy. It just...is. For barely over two hundred pages, it's fine, unexciting but fine. Any longer, though, and I'd be mental for need of some kind of verve, some hint of passion for or prejudice against. Like this: “That was always the way in Ireland, he said. You’d be hung for robbing an apple and made king if you robbed a castle.” Or this: “That’s what young ones do once the madness starts coursing through them. It’s a dangerous place in a person’s life, that shadowy path between childhood and adulthood, and it’s pocked and hexed with all sorts of traps and trials.” Or this: “Pokey had a friend from Malta or one of those quare places who was living down near the lake, just back from the foreshore, in one of those big low houses that was built on a foundation of bribes and bullshit back in the eighties.”

No one's ever said, thought, or written that before, have they.

So I found the execution wanting, and was not excited by the extremely short chapters that change viewpoints and function as slighly underdeveloped stories. If you're telling stories making them wgolly their own thing is best...but these are interdependent fragments of a narrative, I think, so neither fish nor fowl. If this was a deliberate choice, an intentional development of storytelling, it did not hit the mark for me. Too much slid past the PoV switches for me to feel fully satisfied.

Others will disagree, and will thoroughly relish all my cavils as features. I'm not warning anyone away from a poor product; your own tastes be your guide, and Kindle up a sample to see what you think of the writing.

For me, this is my last foray into this bit of Irish literature.

THE BOY FROM THE SEA, Irish fable-making for this century's needs

THE BOY FROM THE SEA
GARRETT CARR
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

NOMINATED for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award...a longlist of twenty will be announced in February 2026, the shortlist of six in April 2026, the winner(s) in May's festival.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 'Compulsive reading. Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan Bonnar by Ambrose, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

Ambrose, a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it’s a decision that will fracture his family and force him to try to understand himself and those he cares for.

Bookended by the arrival and departure of a single mesmerizing boy, Garrett Carr's The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.

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My Review: Funny thing how kindness skips a generation. Declan, the titular "Boy"'s older sibling, wouldn't know kindness if it fucked him. The elder Bonnar couple love their magical gift of a child..."Parents knew you can never tell how a child will turn out, naturally yours or not. They had learned, fundamentally, every child comes in from the sea, washes up against the ankles of their parents, arms outstretched, ready to be shaped by them but with some disposition already in place, deep-set and never quite knowable"...Brendan, named for the Navigator, that famously fostered child. The boy, like mythical Brendan, never has his own place to take root...thanks, Declan...but instead becomes a source of bemusement in the community.

The narrative is from a godlike omniscient third-person PoV...the godlike, or royal, "we." It's a choice that, while conferring the reader with the advantage of being privy to things a more limited PoV would make awkward to show, removes us from the action. Observing from a distance is always going to slow one down when reading about the intimate life of a community. It did here. There are so many small, mean-souled people in Brendan's world. It doesn't relent, either, when we see his "family"...mother Christine's horrifying sister and father, and unwilling sibling Declan...being so unreservedly awful to him. As though being abandoned in a Moses-like way was somehow his fault, or merited (like any infant deserves abandonment).

So quite a melancholy read for me. As I've come to expect from Irish writers, or the ones who get published in the US anyway, the prose has real lyricism. Unexpectedly it breaks into quotidian musings on things like the EU and its fishing quotas..."He still felt guilty about his comportment with Christine later, as he sat in his car outside the fisheries office. He’d never actually apologize but he’d be extra jovial in their next few encounters; this was how we indicated we were sorry for something we’d said or done: by acting oddly the next time we met you"...and the waning control of the church on peoples' inner lives..."A note on our use of the word ‘grand’ is here required. It might sound like a relative of good or great but in our usage it was something different. ‘Grand’ was how we acknowledged that something wasn’t good or great while also saying nothing could be done and there was no point going on about it"...and eldercare..."Eunan {Christine's ghastly father} was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements. He was against surprises, he hadn’t allowed a telephone in the house for many years as you never knew when it might ring on you. He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. ‘Get away out of that!’ he’d shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever."

What you're getting in this story is not showy, or fast, or loud. It is just like the sea that dominates this Western Irish town. It is quiet and inner-directed, with wild outbursts of damage and trouble, followed by the calmer gift-giving phase again. It is a lovely, involving visit to a lifeway long since altered by the relentlessness of change grown from within anf imposed from without.

I very much enjoyed the story's two-decade time frame. They were the last years of an Ireland now so completely vanished that one would be hard pressed to see it in modern Ireland. An elegy, albeit an emotionally honest one, to the way the country once was, with characters standing in for ways old and new. A read I expect will launch the writer into world notice because it is so plangently plucking heartstrings all the way through.

I don't mean that as a diss, only a recognition. I'm hip to your tricks, Author Carr, and I see how well you're performing them. That earns you a respectful tip-of-the-cap four stars.

THE BEE STING, Paul Murray's calling-card book

THE BEE STING
PAUL MURRAY
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This book is A Lot. Long, deep, densely packed.

I enjoy reading anything that plays in the quantum fields of many worlds. The idea of one.little.change. making all the difference in one's life is very empowering, as well as nonsense, and honestly hazardous. All of those are reasons we love to mess with it safely in our fiction. Here Paul Murray goes full-tilt boogie down this waterslide, wets us to the bone in the spume of his landing, and completely destroys our hairdos.

Is it good anyway? Well...honestly...yes, but in a curious way no. Want to laugh hollowly at the folly of the merely mortal? Come hither, disciple dearest. Want to process your grief at the titanic (or Titanic) sinking of the life you planned? This is your altar call. Or is the appeal of a stonking novel immersive and redemptive reading? Hie thee hence, pilgrim. Nothing for you here...there is no redemption here, no one's gettin' what they think they deserve before the Apocalypse that's looming calypses. Need rigorous copyediting with Oxford commas, periods, line breaks, and other such embankments to channel the flow of the words? Ite, missa est. No communion cookies for you, though madeleines will be served in the Sodality of Marcel's post-tea.

Digressive is my word for this seemingly Irish specialty of novels (Milkman's another favorite) that don't give a feck for your English rules. Me, I'm down with it, I like things that don't slavishly straiten their gates to some Authority's pre- and proscriptions just cuz. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of the culture wars! Whatever you do, don't be boring!

That said...well, honestly I found the central thesis of the family tedious and predictable: Dad's crushed, Mom's hogtied and struggling, Junior's got his antennae out so far they can find meaning in electric currents imperceptible to an ammeter, Sis is in thrall to the Mother of All Crushes on the most dreary poseur in all of literature...really, does this need retelling? The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, To the Lighthouse, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and every Colleen Hoover book ever written fill these separate niches extremely ably...have for most of a century. (It felt like a century passed when I read 102pp of It Ends With Us. *shudder* I {mildly mis-}quote that nasty little creep Truman Capote: "That's not writing, that's typing.")

So my bag was mixed. I loved parts, liked most of it, and was impatiently awaiting liftoff that never quite generated enough thrust to get me over the literary Kármán line. Hence my stingy-feeling 3.5 stars. It might be stingy but it's waaay better than most stuff I read and toss aside. I'm really umpressed with Author Murray's swinging for the fences in all his writing and storytelling. I mean, mad respect for going toe-to-toe with the twentieth century's greats (and megabestselling hack Hoover)! But coming for the monarch isn't safe lest you fail to slay them.

No slaying here, though some serious wounds were delivered.