LITERARY FICTION
THE WILD LAUGHTER by Caoilinn Hughes
(Oneworld €17.99) SET in Ireland after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, this riotous dark comedy is told by Hart, the put-upon son of a cancer-stricken potato farmer, whose overreach during the boom years leaves his family on the brink of destitution.
As Hart is railroaded into a plan to get one over on the developer who sweettalked them into debt, a story that starts as a revenge caper segues into a wrenching drama of filial duty when Hart finds himself the fall guy for his father’s drastic exit strategy.
With much to relish in the crunchy vernacular and ribald humour of his zesty first-person testimony, there’s a rich range of pleasures on offer here, not least in Hart’s sparring with his cunning brother, Cormac, whose piein-the-sky scheming has us reading from behind our hands.
Hughes captures a feverish moment of country-wide crisis in a first-rate tale of family debt that isn’t only financial.
A TRAVELLER AT THE GATES OF WISDOM by John Boyne
(Doubleday €18.95) YOU don’t have to squint too hard to see Boyne’s new novel as a response to readers who have taken issue with his use of artistic licence in bestsellers such as The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, set in Auschwitz, and My Brother’s Name Is Jessica, about a transgender teen.
In bite-sized chapters, it continually recasts the life of a single, unnamed narrator over 2,000 years and in nearly 50 countries, from the dawn of Christianity to a post-apocalyptic space colony 60 years hence, via Eritrea in 340 AD, North Korea in 1301, Japan in 1743 . . .
The eye-catching concept doesn’t survive the oddly self-cancelling manner of its execution, which depends on relentless scene-setting that soon feels almost punitively redundant once you cotton on to the book’s rather self-serving gist — namely, that whatever the time and place, humanity has essentially remained the same, for good or ill.
It’s gimmicky, grandiose and painfully stodgy.
AUGUST by Callan Wink
(Granta €18) THE trials of masculinity in backwoods America have long been a staple of US fiction, but Callan Wink’s quietly brilliant comingof-age debut shows the subject is far from exhausted.
It follows the teenage years of a farmer’s son, August, who is 12 years old when he moves to a new town with his mother after his father takes up with a farmhand.
Set against a post-9/11 backdrop of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, his ensuing rites of passage aren’t plotted so much as gently shaped by a series of random encounters, from the thirtysomething woman next door, who exploits his lust while he’s still underage, to an overbearing local drunk who drags him into a family feud.
Yet while Wink gives his characters room to breathe, this stealthily engrossing novel never feels pressureless, with a steady crackle of tension as August steers his perplexed path through a crossfire of expectations regarding what it means to be a man.