Jennifer McShane recommends the reads worth savouring over these long autumn evenings.
There’s something eerily familiar about Catherine Prasifka’s This Is How You Remember It (Canongate, approx €15.99), and its innocent beginnings of technology before a darker side unfolds. Told in second person, our narrator, who we know only as “You,” is enamoured with the internet and its cute Google searches of cats (and anything else) with just a few clicks. Things don’t stay cute when the first snatches of internet porn turn into “hardcore” videos and chatrooms. You is every young girl trying to figure out the complex world of love and sex – and on the page, it’s stomach-churning to realise that the digital realm told us, too early, so much more than we ever needed to know. A powerful, important read.
Short stories are the perfect reads, but they sometimes get a bad rap as something to throw in a bag without much thought. In the best way possible, there’s nothing light and airy about Lucy Caldwell’s Openings (Faber & Faber, approx €13.99). Achingly real and sometimes too close for comfort, there’s the story of the mother who takes care of the kids while her husband works hospital shifts during lockdown, the only contact they have via FaceTime. Or the woman separated from her Muslim husband, alone with three kids in London. Caldwell’s third poignant collection of motherhood, marriages, and love affairs is full of the depth of monumental moments intertwined with the drummings of ordinary life.
When Maddy Wight is hired to ghost write the memoir of renowned cosmetic surgeon Dr Angela Reynolds, it’s a chance to get her career back on track. But on Angela’s remote estate in the Scottish Highlands in a glass-walled house, something feels off. Objects go missing, she feels constantly watched. Drawn to Angela’s enigmatic business partner, Scott, they plan a future once her book is done, only for Maggie to learn Scott leapt to his death on the cliffs… until she sees him coming out of a tube station months later. In Eye of The Beholder (Simon & Schuster, approx €13.99) author Emma Bamford sinisterly reimagines Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the result is poolside page-turner you won’t put down.
It’s the early 1980s and Fiona Neary and her family have recently moved back from England to the family farm in Mayo. In a decision that will change the course of their lives, Fiona’s mum decides to take in foster children –made out of compassion and also some financial necessity. Over the coming decade, so many children go in and out of the family home, but their faces, their stories, these Fiona can’t forget. In this, compelling, original memoir, the author, through her teenage self, shines a stark light on the chaotic social system – and the lives it irreversibly alters. Parcels in the Post: Growing Up with 50 Siblings (New Island Books, approx €12.99) is a heartwarming, essential read.
Estelle Birdy’s raw Ravelling (The Lilliput Press, approx €16.95) is surprising in its charming authenticity. Set in Dublin’s Liberties, a colourful cast of young men “let loose” on the city as they mitch off school, smoke weed, and tackle CAO forms puts you right in the centre of a modern-day Dublin – almost eerily so. The dialogue is sharp and hilarious (even working in Penneys, every cent is spent on labels to look “fresh”) and they are who they are, the lads: Deno, Hamza, Benit, Karl. They make no apologies, do the best they can and like all great characters, you root for them even when things get tough. A striking debut.
The Ministry of Time (Sceptre, approx €16.99) by Kaliane Bradley is one of those books – you turn the last page and wonder, in the best ways, what you just read. It’s a debut that is large in scope, touching upon everything from the refugee crisis, climate change, Auschwitz and 9/11 but it is chiefly a love story. We meet a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London, and Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to the Arctic. He’s been revived from a cold, grizzly death thanks to a 21st-century government who wants to test the limits of time travel at any cost. Part political thriller, part romance, it shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of IMAGE Magazine.
IMAGE Autumn 2024
The Autumn issue of IMAGE is here, and we’re looking forward to the cool, crisp days as a chance to reset our routine. From new-season looks to inspiring women to glean wisdom from, we’re embracing that “New Year” feeling. Plus: * Sleek style * Grandad dressing * In studio with Irish designer Cleo Prickett * Adaptive fashion * The Irish at fashion month * Inspiring the next generation * Rethinking end of life planning * Regenerative farming * Bobs are back * Navigating antidepressants * The future of Irish food * Group stays * and so much more…
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