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Our next Book Club meets on 27 April 2023 in the Irish Centre at 7 pm. There are two books this time.
‘Eggshells’ by Caitriona Lally ‘A modern Irish literary gem for anyone who has felt like the odd one out’.
‘Inventive, funny and, ultimately, moving’ GUARDIAN
‘Wildly funny’ THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Vivian is an oddball.
An unemployed orphan living in the house of her recently deceased great aunt in North Dublin, Vivian boldly goes through life doing things in her own peculiar way, whether that be eating blue food, cultivating ‘her smell’, wishing people happy Christmas in April, or putting an ad up for a friend called Penelope to check why it doesn’t rhyme with antelope. But behind her heroic charm and undeniable logic, something isn’t right. With each attempt to connect with a stranger or her estranged sister doomed to misunderstanding, someone should ask: is Vivian OK?
This is a poignant and delightful story of belonging that plays with the myth of the Changeling and takes us by the hand through Dublin. A poetic call for us all to accept each other and find the Vivian within.
And: ‘Travelling in a Strange Land’ by David Park, Winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and an Irish Times book of the year.
‘One of Ireland’s great novelists’ Roddy Doyle
‘Wrings the heart’ Bernard MacLaverty
The world is shrouded in snow. With transport ground to a halt, Tom must venture out into a transformed and treacherous landscape to collect his son, sick and stranded in student lodgings. But on this solitary drive from Belfast to Sunderland, Tom will be drawn into another journey, one without map or guide, and is forced to chart pathways of family history haunted by memory and clouded in regret.
Travelling in a Strange Land is a work of exquisite loss and transformative grace. It is a novel about fathers and sons, grief, memory, family and love; about the gulfs that lie between us and those we love, and the wrong turns that we take on our way to find them.
