Normal people by Sally Rooney
What is a normal person? Is anyone normal? and if not, does that not mean that everyone is? I guess normality is often seen of as...
31 March 2019
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally
I first noticed Eggshells when it arrived at work, with those hints about changelings and fairy tale echoes. But I didn’t pick it up at the...
2 December 2018
Mollie on the March by Anna Carey
Mollie Carberry ; book 2 I quite enjoyed the first book in this series, The Making of Mollie, and this second book picks up pretty much...
17 March 2018
The making of Mollie by Anna Carey
Mollie Carberry ; book 1 Mollie Carberry’s life seems pretty dull until she discovers her older sister Phyllis is a suffragette! When she and her friend...
11 February 2018
Downturn Abbey by Paul Howard
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly started life in The Sunday Times and currently stars in The Irish Times, he is a fictional wealthy southside Dubliner. It is a satire...
23 January 2014
Blood by Roddy Doyle
The unnamed central character of this short story finds himself suddenly craving blood. He can’t understand it, he is a normal person, a normal man, why on earth is this happening to him. He tries to rationalise it, maybe he has an iron deficiency? Or maybe it is a totally misdirected sex-drive? And yet, he continues to find himself being drawn towards blood. Bloody raw steaks, the next-door neighbour’s chickens…
22 May 2011
Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
From the new glass bridge which spanned the inscrutable waters of the Grand Canal, the tram purred downhill and glided gently into the heart of the city.
It was the opening of this book that persuaded me to buy it. The way Ní Duibhne pokes fun at that certain class of Dublin people. It made me smile, but because I knew that there really are people who think that way. Or at least there used to be, now with the demise of the Celtic Tiger maybe there are less of them than there once were.
22 February 2009
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
ISBN: 0571218016 See also: Three Monkey’s Interview ; Dublin’s One Book One City ; He was born in the dying days. It was the withering end...
19 July 2007
Once dir. by John Carney
A busker and a Bis Issue seller meet on the streets of Dublin. He also repairs hoovers, which is handy, as she has a problem with...
17 April 2007
Intermission dir. by John Crowley
A great film. Found it really funny, and despite the fact that it is a very Irish film there is not a bit of Oirishness to...
15 September 2003
Spin the Bottle dir. by Ian Fitzgibbon
This is an Irish film, with some of the same characters as the spoof documentary Paths to Freedom. I didn’t catch a lot of that series,...
22 July 2003