My reading in September and October will be will be made up entirely of horror, mysteries, thrillers and urban fantasies as I play my annual Halloween Bingo game, so this week, I’m reading two mainstream novels. I’ve selected two from Ireland. One is a new release and one was published a decade aga and has been on shelves for five and half years. One is a debut novel. One is from a writer a well-respected writer who already had six mainstrram novels to his name. Both of them are set in rural Ireland, one in the north and onr in the south. I’m looking forward to settling into books tell the story of people and how they live free of any gentre tropes.
“Night Swimmers“ (2024) by Roisin Maguire
The cover pulled me in. It’s Irish, its’ by the sea, there’s a dog and moonlight. What more could I want. Well,, good writing and strong characters always help so I checked out the sample and fell in love with this opening:
“SHE HEARD THEM BEFORE she saw them, a cluster of brightly coloured chickens, fussing at the water’s edge, flapping and clucking.
‘Silly bitches,’ she said.
Treading water, blinking the salt from her eyes, she watched them for a moment. They were folding towels, stowing phones in yoga-bags, pulling off sandals. They were toeing the water, expressing dismay at its temperature. They were coming in, now. She could hear the giggles and the tiny little screams of surprise as the water met their smooth white feet. They wore dinky little swim-hats and their shoulders were hunched and pale and narrow.
She flipped herself over and ducked down, down, down under the surface, letting the sparkle of her bubbles soothe her, feeling the cold rush over her skin, her belly, her thighs. A cool hand. She felt the tick of her pulse grow heavy as she dived into the dark, but kept going, kept swimming and wriggling downwards until her heart became a knocking in her throat and temples, forcing her to turn back, push to the surface again, pull fresh air in and blink and drip and breathe and look out to sea and try to pretend she was on her own.
‘What the hell are they doing here?’ she grumbled, lying back crossly and kicking great columns of water up into the air, letting it rain down again, delicious. She could have stayed for ages longer but the shrieking and splashing carried out across the still plane of water in the bay – her bay – and jangled her, spoilt it all. No one ever came all the way around here, to this pebbly, inhospitable place. They put up their windbreakers and their deckchairs and the rest of their shit back around the corner on the main beach where the sand lay golden and inviting and cool and bright, and left this place for her.
Bugger, she thought.”
Roisin Maguire lives in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, where she works as a business manager. In 2019, she completed the Write Here… in Belfast novel-writing course, taught by Jan Carson, which was designed to discover exciting, new Northern Irish voices in fiction. ‘Night Swimmers‘ (2024) is her first novel.
“History Of The Rain” (2014) by Nail Williams
I bought ‘History Of The Rain‘ on the basis of a single quote:
“We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That’s how it seems to me, being alive a little while, the teller and the told. In Faha, everyone is a long story.”
This reminded me of how my grandparents, who were all from Ireland, spoke of the people they knew. There would be stories, often told, some of them even true, that defined how those people were remembered. Every story would start with a recounting of who the person in the story was related to and their connection to the teller of the story. Even as a child, these oral tapestries fascinated me.
‘History Of The Rain‘ was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014 but I’m not going to hold that against it. I’m hoping for something accessible and engaging, that, like the stories I used to listen to, slowly builds a world, one grain of sand at a time.
Niall Williams is a historical fiction author born in Dublin, Ireland. He studied Literature and French at the University College of Dublin and was awarded an MA in Modern American Literature. Niall worked as a copywriter for Avon Books in New York City before leaving America with his wife Chris in 1985 to try life as a writer in Ireland.
In the first four books, Williams collaborated with Chris as they told their life together in Co Clare. Nial’s debut novel, ‘Four Letter of Love”, became an international bestseller and was sold in more than twenty countries. The second novel, ‘As It Is in Heaven‘, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize. He has also written screenplays of which film companies have optioned two.
Mike Finn's Fiction 