Burning Bright, Ron Rash, Canongate, £8.99 This slim collection netted Ron Rash the 2010 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award and earned him comparisons to Raymond Carver, John Steinbeck, William Trevor and Cormac McCarthy.
Sceptical? Don’t be. In Burning Bright, Rash calmly sets about creating a literary world that is entirely his own. The stories are set in his home territory of rural Appalachia. The situations range from the thematically familiar – a woman suspects that her husband may be an arsonist; a farmer and his wife find an intruder on their land – to the heartbreakingly singular, such as The Ascent, in which a boy whose parents have been destroyed by poverty and addiction keeps vigil in a crashed plane with the bodies of two frozen strangers. The language is precise, the pace stately; Rash began his writing life as a poet, and it shows. Every word counts. Every story glitters with beauty and malevolence. If you haven’t read Rash yet, you have a treat in store.
Arminta Wallace
Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland
Diarmaid Ferriter
Profile Books, £15
Historian Diarmaid Ferriter’s exploration of Irish socio-sexual mores from Famine times to the present gives a whole new meaning to the Peace Process cliche, “the totality of relationships on this island”. All life is here, from the poor divil working on a Co Dublin farm in 1900 charged with having attempted “feloniously to have a venereal affair with a certain animal, to wit, a hen”, to the victim of a stabbing outside a Belfast gay nightclub in 2005, who is unsure whether to report the incident as sectarian or homophobic. Ferriter’s approach is a little unsystematic at times, especially in the severely compressed opening chapter, covering from 1845 to 1922, but the book’s generous fund of documentary sources more than makes amends. Admirable also is the way Ferriter balances his exposure of the perennial Irish chasm between public rhetoric and private realities with a refusal to judge the past on the basis of facile retrospective smugness.
Daragh Downes
The Case of the Craughwell Prisoners During the Land War in Co Galway, 1879-85
Pat Finnegan
Four Courts Press, €14.95
Peter Doherty junior was eating his supper at home near Craughwell, Co Galway, on November 2nd, 1881, when he and his family heard a horse in the yard. He went out and was leading the animal back to stable when two gunshots ran out. By the time he had been carried inside, Doherty was no longer alive. Six men were arrested and two were brought to trial, and so began a notorious miscarriage of justice. “Oh, rotten Sligo, it can give a jury to do any work,” was the comment when the trial of Patrick Finnegan and constable Michael Muldowney was moved from Galway, and both were then convicted and sentenced to death. Retired University Hospital Galway consultant Pat Finnegan brings his forensic expertise to his analysis of prison files and the trials of the two innocent men against the backdrop of south Galway land wars. In the end, although their death sentences were commuted, the two men were consigned to 20 years’ imprisonment.
Lorna Siggins
