Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

Short novels are something of a rarity these days. The modern paperback usually weighs in with a respectable minimum of 200 pages. Dipping into Steinbeck’s back catalogue, you’d be hard pushed to find such an average size book from the tome-like East of Eden to the brilliant short novels that made his name. The Red Pony is one such and

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This book blew me away with its relentless sense of longing, a yearning shot through with glimmers of hope that are constantly knocked back down. It’s a book about death and love (of people and place), the search for a sense of meaning in life and, perhaps most interestingly, the agonising process of writing itself.

The story is driven by an

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The story of the life of Vita Sackville-West is as fascinating as any novel. Most famously she was the close friend and lover of Virginia Woolf. This is not merely a salacious titbit but part of the information imparted in Victoria Glendinning’s introduction to All Passion Spent. Information that lends much to the understand of Sackville-West

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When Scholar Yu proclaims: “All worry in life begins from learning to read and write” to the young Lily, he doesn’t realise the prophetic nature of his words. His adopted daughter, Little Flower, as she is then called, is destined to be a woman shaped by the power of the words she writes and recites. Lily, or Yu Xuanji, was a real

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This is the book that Frank Delaney describes as the end of his apprenticeship. Considering the books he has already written – including The Bell Walk, At Ruby’s, Pearl – this is a pretty powerful statement, but does Ireland: A Novel live up to Delaney’s expectations?

The title is itself a proclamation, announcing that this

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One of the great contemporary masters of the short story, American writer Tobias Wolff is also well known for his literary memoirs – 1989’s This Boy’s Life told the tale of his precarious boyhood in the Pacific Northwest and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War continued his story as a reluctant officer in Vietnam.

Wolff’s

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In the mould of Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons writes about sensitive, baffled thirty-something men searching for some meaning to their lives by immersing themselves in sport, music or – as in this case – the beds of foreign students. Alfie Budd is the man in question.

Alfie is a man in mourning for a girl he considered perfect – beautiful

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Northern Lights is the first part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I’d heard many good reviews of this ‘crossover’ series before making the purchase of all three as a present for my brother. I had no intention of actually reading them myself but thought, “I’ll just take a peek at the first page”

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In life as in art, sometimes the most familiar or everyday things can become terrifying in their ordinariness. In his studies of neurosis and hysteria, Freud invented a new word – “unheimlich”. While it’s difficult to translate specifically, (‘unhome-like’, ‘unnative’), it refers to a sense of the uncanny

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