Irish fiction looks set for a good run in the second half of the year. Among the titles to look forward to are the new offering from last year's Bookershortlisted Michael Collins. Although The Keepers of Truth didn't win the gong on that occasion it was a major achievement to make the shortlist and now Collins is back with The Resurrectionists. Set, say publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, in the frozen wastes of North America, this is a tale of the unquiet dead and we're assured it is blackly comic and chilling at the same time. From the same publisher comes The Ledge, a first novel from Blanaid McKinney whose collection of short stories appeared to good reviews. "The antithesis of the nostalgic Irish wallow," is the billing she gets from Weidenfeld who will also publish a followup to The Thief of Time by John Boyne, called The Congress of Rough Riders.
Meanwhile, Faber will publish Eoin McNamee's novel, The Blue Tango, based on a famous miscarriage of justice in the North. This "danse macabre through a shadowy world of corruption and sexual intrigue," revolving around the savage killing of a young woman, is billed as a lyrical narrative of white mischief in post-war Ireland and is due in July.
Next Tuesday sees an unusual event: the launch of a book library in Our Lady's Hospice in Dublin. Up to 1,000 books covering fiction, poetry, biography, history, art - everything under the sun - will be available for patients in the Harold's Cross complex from now on thanks to books gathered for charity during the recent World Book Week. Various other causes also got books but the ones going to the hospice have been donated by Imprint, the books programme on RTE 1, regretfully not running at the moment. The gesture is in honour of the show's former producer Bob Collins who died in the hospice last June. Books are also being donated by various other people, including the Collins family. Poets Theo Dorgan, Paula Meehan and Katie Donovan are among those who will read from their work at the launch next week. It is hoped that booklovers and those in the business will donate more volumes to the venture in the years ahead. Details from Rosemary Dawson: 01-2842036.
The fact that part of the Hill of Tara was excavated by British Israelites who hoped to find the Ark of the Covenant buried up there was just one of the nuggets of information gleaned from a handsome local history publication just published. Edited by young Meath journalist, John Donohoe, who knows the value of keeping local lore alive, it's called On the Banks of the Skane: A Millennium Memoir - Kilmessan & Dunsany and got a rousing launch in the Royal County when it was launched by Gerry Stembridge, who got to know the turf when filming Black Day at Black Rock in the vicinity. Horace Plunkett, who founded the first co-operative store in Dunsany, all part of pushing his cooperative ideal in the difficult agricultural world of Ireland in the 1890s, and the writer Lord Dunsany, are just some of the local luminaries included.
The British Israelites, incidentally, for all their pains discovered only some rock trenches and a few bracelets on Tara which they promptly threw into the Boyne. Just as well they didn't come across the Ark: apparently there's a curse going with it, a curse that attaches to whoever finds it.
Sadbh has read a fair few odd author biographies in her day, but the latest one to thump on her desk made her laugh out loud. Bruno Maddox is the son of the well-known biographer, Brenda Maddox - so perhaps it's not that unusual that his own biographical notes are so arresting. What has young Bruno done? He's written a novel, My Little Blue Dress, which is published by Little, Brown & Co. The novel is a book within a book, which starts out as a memoir which is revealed as being a fake. Of the lad who wrote it, we are told: "Bruno was educated at Westminster School in London, then at Harvard. Despite wildly inconsistent grades he was finally hailed as brilliant for his senior thesis on the use of adjectives in restaurant menus." Etc. The thing is, with all those extraordinary menus floating round these days, that part of his biography might not be the joke Sadbh originally took it for . . .
Sadbh