CREME DE LA CHRISTINE:

Three novels to savour

The Cold Eye of Heaven (2011)

It’s sometimes said that your life flashes before your eyes right before you die. For a grumpy retired solicitor, a collapse onto the floor of his bathroom is the starting point for a journey into his past.

His life is then told in reverse chronology and we see his journey from passionate young man to elderly, regretful curmudgeon, afraid of everything. It’s lyrical, sad, at times very funny, as Dwyer Hickey peels back the layers of this ordinary Dublin man to create an extraordinary book.

Tatty (2004) A child’s voice could so easily be cloying but not in this emotionally devastating novel about a young girl’s realisations of the dysfunction and alcoholism at the heart of her family as she grapples with outside expectations of respectability.

The tragedy is brilliantly leavened with humour, and Tatty is that child who doesn’t just look, but sees. This could be any Irish family so it’s fitting that this book has been chosen as Dublin’s 2020 One City One Book; it is, quite simply, required reading.

The Narrow Land (2019)

As a child, Dwyer Hickey was haunted by her understanding of the Holocaust, and in this novel she imagines a young German concentration camp survivor, who forms an unlikely bond with the artist Edward Hopper and his wife, Jo.

It’s a novel about weakness, longing, snobbery and a woman keenly aware of having been eclipsed. Much like a Hopper painting, there is a symphony of emotion in the minor notes of Dwyer Hickey’s gorgeous prose. This is one of the best books of the last few years.