That Deirdre Madden has been compared to Jean Rhys gives you some indication of what to expect from this novel: soul-searching and angst. As Rhys so often did, Madden focusses here on a young woman, in this case Aisling, who, having left her native Ireland some years before, finds herself working...
All too often, when novelists write about the artistic process, they treat it as if it is a Serious, Weighty Matter. (I’m thinking of novels like The Blazing World, for one.) As a result, we, as readers, never get the sense of well-rounded characters.For the most part, Deirdre Madden gets it rig...
Sisters Sarah and Catherine each have a secret. However, as winter gives way to spring at the bleak and isolated farm where they live with their mother Jane, the burden of these secrets becomes intolerable. Deirdre Madden won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for Hidden Symptoms.
A story about three Northern Irish sisters. It has a double narrative, part of which describes their childhood and shows the impact of the political changes and the violence of the late-1960s upon the people of Ulster, as the wholeness and coherence of early childhood gradually break down.
‘I love this place so much,’ she said, ‘and it will give me great pleasure to share it with someone else.’ They planned a trip for the end of that week to visit a dolmen and a ring of standing stones about an hour’s drive away. But standing in the middle of the stone circl...
‘You mean because they can’t spell?’ ‘No, because they tell you to send them the Haverford-Snuffley Angel, but they don’t say where you’re supposed to send it.’ Wilf was about to pick up the strange letter again when Barney stopped him. ‘Maybe there are fingerprints on it,...
Peter’s Square… As one walks across St. Peter’s Square… As one walks across St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the four rows of Doric pillars which form Bernini’s Colonnade merge and shift so that they seem to increase then decrease in number and their colour changes from golden-grey to deepest black. T...
He would have much preferred that they stayed locked up in the room, because they had a habit of getting into mischief when they were out and about. But just as he was leaving the room they raced across the floor. They ran up his legs, like two squirrels climbing a tree, and hopped into his insid...
Joan is one of those people who drain energy from those around them. She does this to such a degree that sometimes, when he is with her, Fintan feels that he is caught up in a science fiction story, and that his mother is an alien masquerading as an elderly Dublin woman, who siphons off energy to...