LITERARY FICTION ANTHONY CUMMINS
TRESPASSES by Louise Kennedy (Bloomsbury €15.99, 320 pp)
NORTHERN Irish writer Kennedy made waves a couple of years ago with her debut, The End Of The World Is A Cul De Sac, a collection of short stories showcasing a range of different styles.
Her brilliant first novel turns on a cross-class affair in a border town during the Troubles, as Cushla, a young Catholic primary teacher, falls for Michael, a barrister who is older, married and Protestant.
She’s also caring for her widowed mother while moonlighting behind the bar of the family pub and trying to help a pupil whose father is the victim of brutal sectarian violence.
The wonder of the book is that its unassumingly arrow-like narrative can fold so much into its layers: at once intimate and political, it’s a love story, a crime drama and a state-of-the-nation period snapshot.
Kennedy manages the tension expertly, steadily steering us to an explosive climax with no frills, just consummate artistry and control.
A LITTLE HOPE by Ethan Joella (Muswell Press €16.99, 288 pp)
THIS sensitive US debut about a group of neighbours should scratch the itch of any Elizabeth Strout fans eagerly marking time until her next novel.
A mosaic of intersecting vignettes, it centres on Greg, a Connecticut businessman and father whose have-itall idyll is rocked by a grave diagnosis. Also in the spotlight are his wife, Freddie, a seamstress who dreams of being a writer, and Darcy, a curmudgeonly widow worried about her son, Luke, a one-time musician who won’t settle down.
Our view of each character is neatly complicated by the bit-part roles they play in one another’s story, as Joella flits between the perspectives of these and many other residents in an ensemble narrative simmering with everyday drama and heartache.
Sure, a touch more humour or irony would hardly have gone amiss, but the level of craft on display here ultimately compels you to take the book’s cast every bit as seriously as Joella does.
THINGS THEY LOST by Okwiri Oduor (Oneworld €21.99, 368pp)
THE supernatural runs amok, for good and ill, in this boisterous and bittersweet saga tracking four generations of women from a cursed family in a fictional East African town.
At the heart of the tale is a lonely 12-year-old girl, Ayosa, gifted with insight into the traumatic history of her absent mother, Nabumbo, a lauded photographer whose past is marked by violence and grief.
Oduor deploys otherworldly goingson for a slantwise take on the topsyturvy transitions of adolescence, as well as the knotty dilemmas of parental duty and filial obligation, to say nothing of chewier themes involving colonial legacies and the power of storytelling itself.
Less might have been more, though, in a novel that can’t quite dodge the pitfalls of magic realism.
Oduor’s freewheeling invention, an undeniable strength, ends up something of an impediment, too, on account of the reader’s growing sense that anything goes, with one plot point after another pulled out of the hat.