John and Marianne Campbell live with their children, Kate and Philip, at Dulough, the Donegal estate named after nearby Black Lake. Because it was willed to John without the funds to maintain it, he brokers a deal with the government to renovate and open Dulough to the public, shunting his family to a small cottage on the grounds. These changes disrupt the Campbells' seemingly idyllic life. Does the move destabilize the family? Or does it simply reveal existing instabilities among them? Young Philip seeks escape from the turmoil around him by building a hut on an island in Black Lake, an ultimately tragic fancy that further undermines the entire family. ~ Library Journal Reviews
The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes
Keyes delivers a dizzying vertical view of the mismatched, mixed-up tenants of Dublin's 66 Star Street, friends and lovers who grow up, grow old and give way to their "heart currents" with help from a puckish sprite. This multitiered saga of Dubliners searching for "the brightest star in the sky... the planet of love" straddles slapstick and sophistication in an engaging balancing act both giddy and grand. Here's Katie, publicist, freshly 40, and her workaholic, commitment-phobic fella, Conall; newlyweds Maeve and Matt, who hide a violent and crippling secret that binds them and drives them apart; madcap, sassy Lydia, a taxi driver who juggles worries about her aging mom and an over-the-top passion for her sexy flatmate; plucked from nowhere hunk Fionn, who hopes to begin a TV career, and his psychic foster mom and her mean-as-a-snake dog who improbably helps bring all the sweet mayhem to a satisfying close. ~Publisher Weekly Reviews
The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle
Doyle digs into the modern history of Ireland in the concluding volume to the life story of Henry Smart, a teenage Sinn Fein trigger-man first encountered in A Star Called Henry. Here, an aging Henry must preserve his own legend, which is taken away from him first for a film, and then by the IRA. In the mid-1940s, film director John Ford plans to make a movie based on Henry's life, but Henry eventually realizes the film that Ford has planned will reduce his story to sentimental pap. Upon returning to Ireland with Ford, Henry plans on killing the director, but his callousness has faded, and he drifts into the Dublin suburbs, where he meets a respectable widow who may be his long-disappeared wife. Henry ages in obscurity until the '70s, when the IRA uses a distorted version of Henry's story as a PR ploy; as the IRA man who runs Henry explains, "we hold the copyright" to the Irish story ~ Publisher Weekly Reviews
The Fields by Kevin Maher
Set in Dublin in the 1980s, The Fields is the story of young Jim Finnegan's coming-of-age. Benchmarks of his uneven progress include his serial sexual abuse at the hands of the local parish priest and his falling in love with a beautiful older girl, Saidhbh. A bit improbably (he's only 14; she's 17), she returns his affections and in short order becomes pregnant. The two go to London, planning an abortion. But will they follow through, and what will happen to them in the city? Maher's first novel features a wonderfully sympathetic protagonist and first-person narrator in Jim, while his family—his parents and five older sisters—are equally endearing. The voice and tone are spot on, but after a realistic treatment of the characters and a nicely realized setting, the book takes a very odd turn near the end when Jim discovers New Age thought and practices. ~ Booklist Reviews
The Gathering by Anne Enright
*Starred Review* The blessing and the curse of family bonds have been addressed by some of our best writers, perhaps never so movingly as by William Kennedy in his Albany cycle of novels. Now Irish novelist Enright, whose intense lyrical style recalls Kennedy's, gives full voice to another tale of familial agony: Veronica's grief in the wake of her wayward brother Liam's suicide. Past and present merge as Veronica recalls their childhood growing up in Dublin in a family of 14, with never enough money or enough attention from their overburdened parents. She's convinced it all went wrong when Liam was sexually abused by a family friend, and her recollections of that day alternate with sunnier ones of their endless roughhousing and joking. When Liam drowned himself, with a tide of "blood, sea water and whiskey" running in his veins, he took Veronica's sense of purpose with him. Inconsolable, and suffering from insomnia, she spends her evenings driving and writing, trying to come to terms with the fact that "someone you love is dead, and the world is full of people you don't." Enright's hypnotic prose turns her desperation into something fierce and beautiful. ~ Booklist Reviews
An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War by Patrick Taylor
Long before Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly became a fixture in the colourful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, he was a young M.B. with plans to marry midwife Dierdre Mawhinney. Those plans were complicated by the outbreak of World War II and the call of duty. Assigned to the HMS Warspite. Life in Ballybuckebo is a far cry from the strife of war, but over two decades later O’Reilly and his younger colleagues still have plenty of challenges: an outbreak of German measles, the odd tropical disease, a hard-fought pie-baking contest, and a local man whose mule-headed adherence to tradition is standing in the way of his son’s future. Now older and wiser, O’Reilly has prescriptions for whatever ails…until a secret from the past threatens to unravel his own peace of mind.~ Publisher Summary
