Enjoying Claret in Georgian Ireland by Patricia McCarthy
Four Courts Press, €40
This account of 18th-century Ireland’s love affair with claret, taking off when Irish families (part of the Wild Geese exodus) became involved in the Bordeaux wine trade, is felicitously subtitled “a history of amiable excess”. It discusses, inter alia, the Irish penchant for claret, storing and sale of wine, how the gentry competed to outdo each other in hospitality (viceroys’ popularity depended on their hospitality, one dying of overeating and overdrinking at 33), and the central role of toasting, especially among men-only clubs and fraternities (including the notorious Hell Fire Club). Amusing and interesting stories abound, from Swift, Jonah Barrington and others, as do condemnations from, for example, Samuel Madden and the Earl of Orrery, who called gout (an inevitable rampant side effect) “the Irish hospitality”. Beautifully illustrated, an imbiber’s delight. Brian Maye
Zorrie by Laird Hunt
Riverrun, £14.99
An old woman, Zorrie, looks back on the losses and loves that formed her. As a young girl she loses first her parents, then her aunt, and subsequent years are spent sleeping in barns and working casual jobs. She works briefly at a radium processing plant, painting clock faces with a luminescent powder, a glowing, portentous thread to the novel. Zorrie is bound to the soil of Indiana; the Depression of mid-century America is pungent. Throughout is a throb of longing — but the story doesn’t cloy with nostalgia, rather there is a deceptive simplicity to the writing evocative of Elizabeth Strout. Not so much a meditation on loss as a reflection on resilience, and the tender but fierce connections with neighbours, friends and loves, this is a life observed, in a pithy and painterly landscape. Ruth McKee
7½ by Christos Tsiolkas
Atlantic Books, £16.99
When Tsiolkas’s autofictional narrator states that he doesn’t want his metafictional narrative to concern politics, sexuality, race, gender, history, morality, or even the future, the reader might wonder what’s left? Beauty is the answer, whether it be inspired by the coastal surroundings or his memories of lovers, family and friends. He uses these as the raw material from which to populate Sweet Thing. Named for the Van Morrison song, it’s the story of a former porn star now resident in Australia who returns to America for one final job. Delivered in Tsiolkas’s marvellous prose, this novel within a novel, coupled with the narrator’s wider musings, remind us that no matter what’s going on in the world, a constant state of awe and thanks is the only appropriate reaction to life. Pat Carty
Devotion by Hannah Kent
Picador, £14.99
Set, initially, in a Lutheran village in 1830s Prussia, Devotion tells the love story of Hanne and Thea. Once granted royal permission, their community moves to Australia in the hope of greater religious freedoms. Given Hanne’s probable synaesthesia and the reliance on the bible or the frowned-upon sixth and seventh books of Moses of the people around her, Kent’s language is decidedly flowery. Thankfully, an unexpected turn of events during the journey south results in a more interesting reading experience altogether. Ignore the irony of a group escaping persecution by commandeering the homelands of others and enjoy instead a romance that draws you further in the longer it goes on. True love, as Kent paints it, is an unbreakable bond, no matter what form it takes. Pat Carty
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When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, tr. Mara Faye Lethem
Granta Books, £12.99
It takes a while to register the nature of the “we” narrating the opening chapter of this book. The realisation that it is storm clouds “speaking” confirms that this is no ordinary novel. Later chapters will be narrated by mushrooms, dead witches, a bear, the earth and even humans. The novel opens with the death of a farmer poet and everywhere is touched by his poetic sensibility, but it is the mushrooms with their network of mycelium spreading out to bond with the living and the dead that offer the richest exemplar of the way the novel beautifully establishes the complex relations between people and the stories they tell each other. Their lives too will form strands of folklore in their region of rural Spain. Declan O’Driscoll
Sell Us the Rope by Stephen May
Sandstone Press, £8.99
Historical fiction is a tricky tightrope to cross but May manages with ease, displaying such skill and grace that the weight of Russian communism becomes an enjoyable, ticklish feather under his pen. Really, a book on Joseph Stalin, enjoyable? Yet May carries the day. He focuses on a small but important sliver of Stalin’s life: in bustling, grimy London, in 1907, and the fifth congress of the Communist Party. We have the expected cast in the crepuscular gloom: Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg (who quite rightly has the best lines). However, the story centres on Stalin and his relationship with a comrade from Finland, the remarkable Elli Vuokko. May animates it all wonderfully with a stripped back mixture of light and darkness, spiced with dialogue that crackles. A gem. NJ McGarrigle
