Book Reviews

Here's a list of, and links to, all the reviews I've done for Bookmunch since autumn 2009 (newest on top):

Dark Lies The Island, Kevin Barry
Into The Penny Arcade / Marionettes, Claire Massey
New American Haggadah, ed. Jonathan Safran Foer
Homesick, Roshi Fernando
Care of Wooden Floors, Will Wiles
Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd
Dark Eden, Chris Beckett
Falling Sideways, Thomas E. Kennedy
The Beautiful Indifference, Sarah Hall
The Fiction Desk Anthology, Vol 2: All These Little Worlds, ed. Rob Redman
Good Offices, Evelio Rosero
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li
Everything Beautiful Began After, Simon Van Booy
The BBC National Short Story Award 2011 Anthology
The Blue Book, A.L. Kennedy
The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje
Pigeon English, Stephen Kelman
Then, Julie Myerson
Villa Pacifica, Kapka Kassabova
Comes The Night, Hollis Hampton-Jones
On Canaan's Side, Sebastian Barry
The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
The Vintage And The Gleaning, Jeremy Chambers
The Fiction Desk Anthology, Vol 1: Various Authors, ed. Rob Redman
The Forgotten Waltz, Anne Enright
The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna (and my interview with the author)
Hotel Iris, Yoko Ogawa
Diamond Star Halo, Tiffany Murphy
The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan
City of Bohane, Kevin Barry
The Coincidence Engine, Sam Leith
How I Lost The War, Filippo Bologna
Spurious, Lars Iyer
Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, SG Browne
A Widow's Story, Joyce Carol Oates
Voice of America, EC Osondu
We Had It So Good, Linda Grant
Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists
The Granta Book Of The Irish Short Story, ed. Anne Enright
The BBC National Short Story Award 2010 Anthology
The Birth Machine, Elizabeth Baines
Periera Maintains, Antonio Tabucchi
Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, ed. Philip Ó Ceallaigh
Walking To Hollywood, Will Self
The Elephant's Journey, José Saramago
Nourishment, Gerard Woodward
The Escape, Adam Thirlwell
Death Is Not An Option, Suzanne Rivecca
Circus Bulgaria, Deyan Enev
Gone Tomorrow, PF Kluge
Joe Speedboat, Tommy Wieringa
Love Me Tender, Jane Feaver
Deloume Road, Matthew Hooton
The Stars in the Bright Sky, Alan Warner (and an interview with the author)
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Robert Shearman
Ask Alice, DJ Taylor
The Theory of Light and Matter, Andrew Porter
The Housekeeper + The Professor, Yoko Ogawa 

About Me

If anyone needs a level of detail that isn't covered by the photo up on the right - and seriously, I think it says it all - here's a brief Summary Of Life To Date:

I'm thirty-one; I'm Irish; I lived in Dublin until I was twenty-four; I did my BA in English and philosophy (majoring in English) at Trinity College Dublin, and then existential panic set in.  I thought I ought to do something 'more practical' next, but having scant notions of what practicality entailed (and a fear of 'real jobs') I galloped into an MA in Film Production in the glorious Dublin Institute of Technology.  Myself and most of my classmates spent the year after the course queuing up in dole offices, our multiple degrees and lack of Life Skillz making the benefits officers tremble, and putting in pointless funding applications to the Film Council for scripts that probably didn't even make any sense, and generally bemoaning our lot over a pint (we tragically couldn't ever afford more than one drink).  Then, at twenty-four, I finally battered down the doors of a giant broadcasting corporation which shall remain nameless (ha!) here in (hint) Britain, and moved to Birmingham, where I stayed for the next five years working as a video editor.  Oh, the glamour.  I've seen John Craven come out of the loo, and, um, I once saw Johnathan Ross from very far away.  I've said too much.  After my half-a-decade in the Midlands, and about eight months into the life of this blog, I took redundancy from the poor old job, because, obviously, I was missing the good old days of one-pint-and-an-overdraft, and applied to do another MA, seeing as, in the words of my beloved Depeche Mode, I just can't get enough. I've now finished said course, and somehow managed not to aggravate all the teachers, as they've given me a distinction.  Woo!  During the course I worked on a novel (still in-progess) and just after classes finished I won the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize. Success! I then got a temp job selling books for a respectable Manchester book-merchant, and followed it up with, wait for it, a temp job selling books for another respectable Manchester book-merchant. Shortly afterwards, I swung for the idle life, and in April 2011 I produced a brand-new human infant from my very own innards. Hello, Seren! At the moment I'm perfecting the art of balancing an open book on top of a feeding baby. Again, Skillz.

Oh yes, and I heartily recommend that everybody move to Manchester - it's ace.

[Oh, and PS: I don't really do guest posts on here, so probably don't bother asking, and though one of my incarnations is as a book reviewer, this isn't the place for it - if you want me to review something, do please contact Bookmunch instead, and then be aware that there's a team of volunteer reviewers there, of whom I'm only one, and your work might or might not get reviewed by any one of us.]