Popular Fiction: Summer reads from Suzanne Power and Kate McCabe are quite different in tone and flavour but have the wealth and great numbers of their characters in common.
There's variety and diversion a-plenty in the pain, joy and mad shenanigans of some of them but Suzanne Power's Love and the Monroes definitely has the edge when it comes to eccentrics. Hers is a story that consistently twists and turns to, almost, confound expectations.
The backbone of Love and the Monroes is in the Monroe household where, as described by Phoebe, who should know, three generations of women - grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, "live in a co-dependent pile".
Love and the Monroes, we're told early on, are like oil and water, never to mix. Love and a man is, nevertheless, on everyone's agenda and age, thankfully, is not a barrier. Teresa and Grace, also central to things, have happily found lesbian love and are benign enablers in the search.
Love happens in a variety of locations - all around Dublin, on race tracks and in stable yards and, most uplifting of all, on a luminous Greek island.
There's more than a touch of another worldly love going on too, but 'nuff said about that.
Some people wait an awfully long time for happiness in Love and the Monroes but manage, in the interim, to live lives that are at least interesting.
Suzanne Power has a definite way with eccentrics, and eccentric behaviour, but there's a lot of gentle wisdom and good story telling going on here too.
Kate McCabe's book, Hotel Las Flores, is more traditional in that it follows a well-tried formula, introducing us chapter by early chapter to the stories and backgrounds of a group of individuals destined to holiday together in the Hotel Las Flores, Tenereife.
Readers will recognise Charlie, off to the sinful sun because he's never made it with a girl (he does on page 130), and the devastated, ditched-practically-at-the-altar Bobby. Sadly familiar too are Adrian and Trish, in deep marital trouble with both a baby and a book on the way. The beautiful Monica's there because she's been cleaned out by her dead husband's debtors. As in life, sun and sangria lower inhibitions and raise confidence. They, on occasion, tend to usher in gullibility too.
Charlie's confidence certainly soars and if it's based on a false premise what odds? Bobby's one lucky girl, it transpires, and so is Monica, even if Latino love eludes her. Friends are made, lives change and the holiday works for most people in this light- hearted tale. Some get their come uppance, of course, but that's life too.
Rose Doyle's murder mystery, Shadows Will Fall, will be published in paperback by Hodder UK in September
Hotel Las Flores By Kate McCabe Poolbeg, 385pp. €9.99
Love and the Monroes By Suzanne Power Hodder Headline Ireland, 465pp. €10.99