Kirjanurkkaus

Jacket design: Jeff Fisher He stayed awake for a while trying to think about what was going to happen, but he could think of nothing except the empty house at home, everything still and untouched in the darkness, all of the rooms quiet, the fire gone out, the milk he collected in the morning, which now seemed so far away, slowly going rancid in the night. He imagined each room, each piece of furniture until slowly he, too, fell asleep. I got this edition of The Heather Blazing with its beautifully designed cover from my wife for Christmas. I've been wanting to read more novels by Colm Tóibín , especially after reading - and enjoying - Brooklyn so much. The Heather Blazing is Tóibín's second novel and set in his home country, Ireland. The main character is Eamon Redmond, a judge in the Irish High Court. As Eamon spends his days preparing for complicated court cases in a small village on the Irish shore, he begins to remember his childhood and the death of his father. ...

That is why the past is such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet. I read this novel some time ago as part of my 2011 reading challenge about Booker Prize winners, but haven't had time to write anything about it yet. Irish author John Banville's novel won the Booker in 2005 and I have to say that so far it is the Booker winner that has disappointed me the most (well, I haven't read that many of them yet...). And I can't believe that it was up against Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go , and came out as the winner! The novel's main character is an ageing art historian, Max Morden, who returns to the seaside where he spent his holidays as a child. We gradually learn that he is trying to recover from the recent loss of his wife to...

When Declan went to bed, the three women sat in the kitchen eating sandwiches. There was an uneasy peace between them; they chose topics with care and then moved cautiously, alert to the friction which even a stray word could cause. I've read many good things about this novel, including the fact that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. For some reason I was also fascinated by the name The Blackwater Lightship , it just sounded so strange and poetic. I didn't actually realize what the name referred to until about halfway through the novel: Blackwater is a town in Ireland and, in the novel, it has a lightship - a vessel with a light to guide ships, similar to a lighthouse. And, of course, an important symbol in the novel. The novel is set in Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen O'Doherty bids farewell to her husband and two children as they go on a trip to visit relatives. She is planning to follow them a few days later, but her plans change abruptly when a stra...

'Brooklyn changes every day,' Miss Bartocci said as Father Flood nodded. 'New people arrive and they could be Jewish or Irish or Polish or even coloured. Our old customers are moving out to Long Island and we can't follow them, so we need new customers every week. We treat everyone the same. I've been meaning to read something from Colm Tóibín for a while now. I wanted to get a hold of his two earlier novels, The Blackwater Lightship and The Master , both of which were short-listed for the Booker Prize. I've noticed that Booker Prize nominees and award-winners are often books that I also enjoy to read - as compared to e.g. Nobel Prize winners, which often seem a little out of my league... ;) However, the first Tóibín book that I got my hands on was Brooklyn , his newest novel, published in 2009. The novel also won the Costa Novel Award in the same year. And it certainly didn't lower my expectations for any other Tóibín novels that I might read in the f...