Tag: contemporary fiction

#BookReview The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan #BBCRadio4BookClub

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About the Book

In the aftermath of Ireland’s financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence flares, the characters face a battle between public persona and inner desires.

Through a chorus of unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds.

Format: Paperback (160 pages) Publisher: Black Swan Ireland
Publication date: 25th April 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

The Spinning Heart was the book chosen for the December edition of BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub, hosted by broadcaster and author, Jim Naughtie. I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the recording of the programme for which the book’s author, Donal Ryan, had travelled specially from Limerick. It will be transmitted on Sunday 3rd December. My review is a combination of my own thoughts about the book and my recollections of the conversation that took place during the recording.

The book is made up of a series of internal monologues by twenty-one different characters – men and women – each with a distinctive voice. Donal said it was always his intention that the book should have this structure. In fact, initially there were even more characters and he had to regretfully discard some.

In a way each chapter is a mini short story that reveal events in the lives of the characters, their relationships with other characters and their general attitudes. The only dialogue between characters is what they themselves recount in their respective monologues. We learn, little by little, about events following the collapse of a local building company, the owner of which – Pokey Burke – has absconded leaving mayhem in his wake: half-completed ‘ghosts’ estates, employees without the pensions or entitlement to benefits they expected. Some of the characters are directly affected, others indirectly affected by the downturn of the local economy. For example, Brian has plans to ‘go foreign’, following other unemployed men to Australia to find work. Vasya, an illegal foreign worker, faces the prospect of returning home.

Asked about his favourite character, Donal mentioned Lily, a single mother of five children possibly all by different fathers, as a character that came to him almost fully formed. But he always intended that Bobby, the former foreman of Pokey’s building company, should be the ‘hero’ of the book. Bobby feels a responsibility to do something to help those let down by Pokey. Many of the male characters look up to him or wish to emulate him.

The phrase ‘a proper man’ occurs a couple of times and it seemed to me that what it means to be ‘a proper man’ is one of the themes of the book. At one point, Bobby remembers attending a play with his wife, Triona, and observes, ‘Imagine it being found out, that you went to see a play, on your own! With a woman, you have an excuse for every kind of soft thing.’ On the other hand Pokey’s father, Josie, wonders whether, if he had played more of a role in his son’s upbringing, things might have turned out differently.

The stories the characters recount often involve dark themes, such as domestic violence, and at times the book feels quite bleak. Many of the characters feel shame – at being duped, at things they’ve done or haven’t done. Troubled relationships abound, especially between fathers and sons. Indeed, the book opens: ‘My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down.’ However, despite the difficult situations in which some characters find themselves, I felt the book finished on a hopeful note.

Although this wasn’t my experience, at the end of the book some readers found themselves uncertain about Bobby’s fate. Donal said he hadn’t intended there to be any uncertainty but reading the closing chapters back now he could understand why some readers felt that way. He revealed the book’s sequel, set ten years after this one and due to be published next year, should provide reassurance!

As is often the case, hearing the author talk about the book only increased my admiration for it. There were definitely themes and nuances I hadn’t fully appreciated, meaning The Spinning Heart is a book I will certainly re-read. I also enjoyed listening to the author’s answers to the interesting and insightful questions asked by other attendees.

It was fascinating to attend the recording in BBC Broadcasting House. The hour simply flew by and I don’t envy the task of editing down the discussion to 25 minutes. After the recording there was an brief opportunity to chat to the author and have your book signed.

If you live in or near London, I can definitely recommend attending a recording. You can find the details of how to do this on the programme’s webpage. There are also over 300 previous episodes available to listen to. (You do not need a TV licence to do this.) If it’s not practical for you to travel to a recording, can I suggest as an alternative the BBC World Service’s World Book Club. You can email questions to future guests and may be invited to phone in and put them to the author directly, as I was for the edition discussing The Bitch by Pilar Quintana.

In three words: Immersive, authentic, moving

Try something similar: Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

About the Author

Donal Ryan is an award-winning author from Nenagh, County Tipperary, whose work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted ‘Irish Book of the Decade’. His fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Strange Flowers, was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller. Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.

#BookReview The Book of Fire by Christy Lefteri

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About the Book

Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.

A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life in a tiny Greek Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the region’s natural beauty wiped out.

In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn’t there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation.

Format: Hardback (342 pages) Publisher: Manilla Press
Publication date: 17th August 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

The Book of Fire has a strong environmental message. Even before the fire that devastates part of the island, Irini’s father-in-law Lazaros has warned of the damage being done by human activity as a result of global warming. ‘The entire earth is changing, we have neglected our home, Irini.’

The way in which the terrible consequences of the fire are conveyed is one of the most powerful elements of the book. There are the physical scars left on those burned whilst trying to escape from the fire, such as Irini’s daughter Chara and her husband Tasso. There are the mental and emotional scars of those who lost loved ones, whose homes were destroyed or livelihoods damaged. In one particularly affecting scene, Irini visualises the people no longer in their accustomed places in the village cafe. ‘Maria’s is the only place in the world where you don’t have to ask people how they got burnt, where their scars came from.’

And, as Irini observes on her daily walks, the fire has turned the forest from a place of beauty, teeming with life, to a place without life. ‘Death scattered all around. Death beneath my feet: the ashes of insects and animals and leaves, the ashes of colour, of a million greens and a million browns, the ashes of sounds, of scuttling and sighing, of rustling, of birdsong.’

I particularly liked the tender and loving relationship between Irini and Tasso, as Irini patiently waits for signs that the mental anguish he is suffering due to the events on the night of the fire might diminish and show the first signs that he is returning to the man he once was. Irini’s fierce protectiveness towards her daughter, badly burned in the fire, is also touching.

I was less a fan of the structure of the book in which the narrative alternates between Irini’s first person description of events before and after the fire, including her first meetings with Tasso as a child visiting her grandparents, and chapters entitled ‘The Book of Fire’ written by Irini as a kind of journal in a style that resembles a fable. The entries gradually reveal Irini’s and Chara’s experiences on the night of the fire but are written in the third person with the descriptions ‘the mother’ and ‘the daughter’ replacing their names. Much of the story we already know, for instance that Irini, Chara and Tasso survive the fire, meaning there is very little sense of jeopardy and it feels a little repetitious.

The most interesting part for me of ‘The Book of Fire’ sections is the story ‘the mother’ tells ‘the daughter’ while they wait to be rescued. It describes her own family’s history, including the forced exodus of Greeks from Turkey in the 1920s which led to her great-grandfather’s arrival in Cyprus. You don’t have to be a genius to think of modern day comparisons when Irini’s great-great-grandfather observes to his son: ‘It is dangerous to see things in black and white, even – and maybe especially – during troubled times… Each side hates each other because of memories and traumas on both sides, some are real and some are imagined, and those become national narratives. They demonise each other. The “other” is always to blame and it fuels people and groups and governments with fire. This never leads to any good on this earth.’

The book’s other plotline involving the man responsible for starting the fire explores the nature of revenge, whether it can ever be justified and whether it can actually bring the peace they desire to those who seek it. If it was the author’s intention that the reader have conflicted feelings about the rightfulness of the actions of Irini and others, then she succeeded.

Despite the terrible events that take place in the book, there are glimpses of hope, whether that’s the giant chestnut tree whose unburned half shows sign of life, the recovery of a young jackal rescued from the forest or the simple action of someone lifting a cup to their mouth by themselves for the first time.

I received a review copy courtesy of Manilla Press via Readers First.

In three words: Emotional, intense, thought-provoking

About the Author

Brought up in London, Christy Lefteri is the child of Cypriot refugees. Her novel, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, is an international bestseller, selling well over a million copies worldwide and published in over 40 countries. It won The Aspen Literary Prize, was runner up for The Dayton Literary Prize and won the Prix de l’Union Interalliée for Best Foreign novel in France. It is currently being performed as a play, adapted by Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler, for The Nottingham Playhouse, and touring the UK. Songbirds, her follow up novel, was a Sunday Times and international bestseller. (Photo: Twitter profile)

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