Keeper of Stones by Ger Moane (Tribes Press, €15)
Briona, growing from adolescence into adulthood, is dealing with awakening sexuality, assessing whether friends are true or false, choosing a career. She is at that challenging stage where momentous decisions have to be made – who will be her partner, what work will she choose, where will she live? The unusual feature of this bildungsroman is that Briona lives in the stone age, and she is on an adventurous journey across ancient Leinster, on a ‘turas’ to the mound of Newgrange. The author’s deep love of landscape and nature shines through many exquisite descriptions of landscape, as does her passionate interest in shamanism, Irish mythology and psychology. This is a joyous, colourful, and unique novel. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Unseen by Breda O’Toole (Gill Books, €18.99)
Breda O’Toole’s memoir is not an easy read – nor should it be. It is a story about one woman’s life lived out in a harsh and hostile Ireland. This is a deeply personal story of tremendous resilience and recovery in the face of a psychiatric system and wider society that seemed to promote the opposite. O’Toole draws on her medical records that chart her 23 years of psychiatric treatment, during which she spent 11 days in a straitjacket and underwent 29 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. This book is a testament to O’Toole’s resilience and her hard-won recovery. Perhaps more importantly though, this book is a poignant literal manifestation of O’Toole finding her voice; no longer is she unheard or unseen. Paul D’Alton
READ MORE
Gallivanting with Words, How the Irish Speak English by Colm O’Regan (Gill Books, €16.99)
Boke, pox, cat malogen. These are all examples of Hiberno-English or “the language we made when we took a version of English that was brought here on ships by soldiers, administrators and planters”. In a book that obsesses over the nuance of language, ‘took’ makes for an interesting choice of verb. Nonetheless, the author of Bolloxology and the Irish Mammies series is a warm and enthusiastic narrator in this ramble through the intricacies of English as spoken by the Irish. “Gas”, “craic”, “do be” ... the usual suspects appear, but there is more to it than that. However, while ‘gallivanting’ by nature, is informal, this book would have benefited from a tighter structure to become less a brain-dump than a guide through our colourful “mad yoke of a language”. Brigid O’Dea
