Ruthie Swain’s poet-father died recently, and she seeks to rekindle his memory through rereading his entire personal library. She ends up retelling his life and her grandfather’s life through this meandering yet meaningful tale of rural County Clare, Ireland. It concludes with deeply emotional moments all the way through the last chapter. I was moved to tears at multiple points, telling my wife, “I hate novels that make me cry because I love novels that…
Noe, short for Noel, is a teenage orphan who recently moved from Dublin to live with his grandparents in a small Irish town. Just prior, he enrolled in a seminary with the thought of seeking a priestly calling, but dropped out. Instead, he is now trying to find direction in life. Suddenly, in his small community of Faha, it stops raining, and the sun comes out. The sun never stays out in this rainy realm…
I have recently fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s short stories! This collection contains her earliest published works. Some of the stories are strange and leave me wondering what the point of such grotesqueness was. More than once, I flipped back through the story to skim it again so that I can understand the action better. Consistently, stories have a twist at the very end that makes each word of an entire meandering piece come…
This short story tells a first-person account of an Irish child sent to live with relatives in the countryside. At the outset, she does not know whether she will ever return home again. She quickly discovers that her new guardians are kind and affectionate in a way that her parents never were. She grows to feel at home there… until something terrible happens to make her see her situation for what it is. Then her…
This book deserves to be the next A Christmas Carol in the English language. Surely, even Charles Dickens cannot outdo Claire Keegan. In this work, she touches on themes of religious hypocrisy in the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. The message of Christmas and of the Christian Gospel, with their themes of oppressed things becoming great, is juxtaposed against an entrenched church beholden to money, power, and a corrupt socioeconomic system. This month of March,…
This plot’s preamble begins in 19th-century Oregon, but quickly pivots to a prior time in Ireland during the famine of 1847. It shares the true story of an entire starving village traveling to its British landlord begging for food. Sadly, the landlord refuses succor, and the entire town dies beside a nearby lake. In O’Mahony’s tale, only one person survives, and utterly alone in the world, Honora immediately determines to move west to America in…