Welcome to Litsy!

Normally Ozzie won‘t model books for me but he‘s sleepy so I made it happen. 😂

I finished this a few days ago, and have been trying to process it since. It‘s another where I don‘t really know what I feel about it. The writing is beautiful, and the way the author creates a that feeling of an undercurrent of tension an Irish town affected by recession is very well done. I recognise that it‘s an excellent book, so it‘s getting a pick. But it‘s not really my “thing” - whatever my “thing” is!🤣

There is a palpable tension and anxiety that builds in this novel because the MC Sunday seems so vulnerable, though there isn‘t anything explicitly threatening in it. I could feel how Sunday‘s rich inner emotional life conflicted with the flat affect of autism she presented. It was a relief when she quit struggling to conform to social expectations and allowed herself to just be. Worth a reread!

This has been my handbag book for the past few weeks. Elderly Anne is succumbing to dementia (in a gentle way, so not too confronting) & the truth of her life is on the way to being lost with her memories. Meanwhile her beloved grandson, Luke, is fighting in Afghanistan and losing the last of his illusions about honour & loyalty. The military scenes are far from heroic, but all the more effective for it. Very moving.

My 10th from the Booker longlist was wonderful! I came in with no expectations and was rewarded with an inspiring story. A novel about an autistic boy who misses the mother he never knew, working out a device for perpetual motion; and a school teacher in a bad marriage exhausted by her dysfunctional all-boys school, yet fully committed to it. A novel of the children of missing parents, some grown, stumbling through life. Recommended! #booker2023

Too true, I fear ☹️

This is the second book I‘ve read by Williams & I just can‘t say how much I appreciate his writing. While this novel definitely has a plot and characters I grew to adore, it is the writing, the turn of phrase, the truths that so resonated for me that made this special. There is a brief lull where I wondered where we were going and why, but it didn‘t matter ultimately. It‘s a meandering, extremely Irish, tale - one I was delighted to sit with.

I have lived with this feeling for years!

A quiet but challenging book. Two foreigners - a French linguist and an English painter - arrive on a very small Irish-speaking Irish island in the 1970s, each with their own agenda. The story of the island is interspersed with matter of fact paragraphs of incidents from the Troubles. Asks questions about the impact and demands of foreigners on a small community, and how those butt up against the community‘s own needs and desires.

My great-grandparents to the US came from Ireland. Is that why I love the writing of Williams so much? Ireland is in my blood and each line of this book feels perfectly attuned to what I need in an Irish story. It meanders & digresses. I don‘t understand how Williams writes the way he does. It‘s so potent & creative and funny and surprising. I‘m moving very slowly through the book which just demonstrates the amount of respect I have for him.