A collection of perceptive portraits of life in rural England at the turn of the 20th century.
These 15 short stories from a respected, if not widely known, English writer who died in 1957 penetrate the outwardly simple existence of an assortment of inhabitants of rural Britain to produce sophisticated depictions of their inner lives.
Even the slightest of Coppard’s tales exude a strong sense of place while some of the longer ones possess an almost novelistic scope. In the latter category are stories like “The Handsome Lady,” which movingly depicts the life of a man torn between his duty to his invalid wife and his love for another woman. “Ring the Bells of Heaven” traces the career of Blandford Febery, who leaves his family’s farm on a Suffolk heath to become first an actor and then a revivalist preacher before experiencing a crisis of faith. In “The Higgler,” an itinerant peddler lives to regret an imprudent romantic choice that alters his life forever. Coppard neither creates rustic stereotypes nor condescends to his characters, consistently capturing their essences in a few economical brush strokes. That’s true of Phillip Repton, from the O. Henry–esque story “Fifty Pounds,” a writer who finds that his projects “insolvently withered, and morning, noon, and evening brought his manuscripts back as unwanted as snow in summer,” or Molly Wickham, in “The Wife of Ted Wickham,” who is “sound as a roach and sweet as an apple tree in bloom.” A house with windows that would “often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed to burn like a box of contained and smokeless fire” is but one of the many striking settings Coppard sketches in sharp, vivid detail. Though the details of his characters’ daily routines may seem alien to modern sensibilities, their emotional struggles are instantly recognizable and memorably evoked.
A collection of perceptive portraits of life in rural England at the turn of the 20th century.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-305416-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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