Tag: Ireland

The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien: Book Review

August 19, 2014

The Country Girls sent shock waves through rural Ireland when it was published in 1960. Across the sea, London was about to enter the Swinging Sixties but in Eire, sex was seldom mentioned openly and especially not when it involved unmarried girls.  Edna O’Brien’s novel about two girls who leave their convent upbringing and small village life […]

TransAtlantic by Colum McCann

October 28, 2013

Colum McCann opened his award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin with a dramatic, real-world event  — Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the newly built Twin Towers of New York.  In similar vein he opens TransAtlantic with another astonishing feat — the first nonstop transatlantic flight by the British airmen Alcock and Brown shortly after the […]