Ossining Review of Books

A High Five for March

By Ray O'Hanlon

Ossining resident Ray O'Hanlon is Senior Editor of the Irish Echo. He is the author of the 1998 book The New Irish Americans.

Irish authors are ranging wider these days in their choice of domicile and subject matter. Two of the five authors mentioned here live in the United States while another writes his tales in England. But there's nothing new in Irish writers wandering. Just ask James Joyce!

  1. The Hill Road, by Patrick O'Keefe, published by Viking.

    Hot off the shelves, this first book from O'Keefe recently captured the $20,000 Story Prize, presented by the New School in Manhattan. O'Keefe is from Limerick, the part of Ireland that gave birth to Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. The book is actually a collection of four stories set in the fictional parish of Kilroan. O'Keefe, a graduate of the University of Kentucky, lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been compared to James Joyce no less and additionally Alice Munro and William Trevor.
  2. The Sea, by John Banville, published by Knopf. Another prizewinner!

    John Banville is not everyone¹s cup of tea. The New York Times panned this, his latest novel, but the Man Booker Prize committee awarded the Wexford-born writer the prize for what is Banville¹s 14th work of fiction. The Sea is the first work by an Irish author to win the Booker since Roddy Doyle carried off the laurels in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Banville himself was previously nominated for a Booker on the back of his 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence, an extraordinary tale based on a real life murder in Ireland.
  3. Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow and Bad Men, all by John Connolly, Atria Books/Simon & Schuster.

    Dubliner Connolly sets his mysteries in the U.S. and does such a good job you would think he was living next door to Stephen King. Indeed, Bad Men is set on an island off the coast of Maine. Every Dead Thing introduced ex-cop Charlie Parker and is a story of murder and magic that runs from New York to the swamps of Louisiana.
  4. The Dead Yard, by Adrian McKinty, published by Scribner.

    McKinty is from Northern Ireland but lives in Denver, Colorado. McKinty maintains his ties to his Irish roots in that his previous novel, Dead I May Well Be, has in its pages New York Irish gangsters and Boston-based IRA offshoots. The Dead Yard is a sequel to Dead I May Well Be, which, word has it, is being made into a movie directed by John Lee Hancock for Universal Pictures. Another writer from the North to check out is Belfast¹s Ronan Bennett. His novels, The Catastrophist and Havoc In Its Third Year, are set in different continents and in different centuries, the latter serving up a finely spun, dark tale of religious intolerance in 17th century England.
  5. The Story Of Chicago May by Nuala O Faolain, from Riverhead Books.

    O¹Faolain has been rolling New York Times bestsellers off the presses for a few years now and this, her most recent book, comes on the heels of Are You Somebody? My Dream of You and Almost There. It is based on the true story of May Duignan who fled the west of Ireland in the 19th century and blazed a trail across America until her death in 1929.