Small screen: Fine festive fare

and his young boat-hand must draw on every instinct to survive. It is often brutal and, in order to live, it is necessary for something else to die.

It is also a revelation. Rescue seems less likely as time passes, questions intensify about what a person will do to survive and what runs through their mind — thoughts, memories, people back home? And what drives one person to forge on, another to give in to the elements — to let their life slip away beneath the waves.

Described as part-survival story and part-existential parable, it is also a comment on our throwaway society, the pollution of the environment. But it is in large part this detritus floating in the ocean — a fragile link with civilisation — that washes up against Bolivar’s boat, that he hauls on board and re-purposes into fishing gear that ensures his survival.

Despite the polluted state of the sea on which fishermen like Bolivar depend to make their living, it is possible to do more than just survive ... but rather to come out the end of a horrifying experience to embrace life and, perhaps, be a better man.

This is Paul Lynch’s fourth novel; his others have won awards in his homeland of Ireland and globally.

Although a slight book in length, it is not a slight read. Almost poetic, the short sentence structure left a slightly jarring impression.

Perhaps that is the point — that the entire novel aims to shake the reader out of their comfort zones, to make them think about how our actions impact on the environment and to consider what lengths a person will go to to survive, from one day, a week, a month to the next.