Category: Setting

Author, Book review, Harper Collins, History, Non-fiction, Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge

‘Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland’ by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Non-fiction – ebook; Harper Collins; 528 pages; 2019.

I was mid-way through reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, his award-winning non-fiction book about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, when Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Féin leader, appeared in the High Court in London. He was being sued for symbolic £1 damages by three victims of Troubles-era bombings on the UK mainland. Adams has long denied ever being a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

By the time I finished the book, the civil case had been withdrawn (see here), though the claimants described it as “a significant and legitimate attempt to establish the truth about responsibility for events during the Troubles”. Despite nine days of hearings, we are no closer to any settled version of that truth.

Like the book itself, the case circled a contested history that was shaped as much by silence and denial as by what can be proven. As the title Say Nothing^^ suggests, the culture in Northern Ireland during the Troubles was one of guarded speech and self-censorship, where speaking openly risked exposure, reprisal or betrayal.

Based on four years of research, Radden Keefe’s narrative non-fiction is a gripping account of a complex, violent history. He filters the wider conflict through a single disappearance — the 1972 abduction of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was taken from her home and never seen alive again.

The book tells the stories of those connected to the case: Dolours Price, a Provisional IRA member; Brendan Hughes, a senior IRA commander and Belfast Brigade leader; and Gerry Adams, who has always denied formal involvement in the organisation. Through them, the book builds a history of the Troubles and highlights a network of partial, often conflicting truths.

Radden Keefe, who is part Australian, part Irish and was raised in the United States, explains his intent:

In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalised in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals — and a whole society — make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect (page 387).

Continue reading “‘Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland’ by Patrick Radden Keefe” →
Alan Fyfe, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, Transit Lounge

‘The Cross Thieves’ by Alan Fyfe

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 208 pages; 2026. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Alan Fyfe’s latest novel, The Cross Thieves, is the second in his planned trilogy centred around the Peel region, just south of Perth, in Western Australia.

His debut T, was a chilling look at a community of junkies (my review) told in spare but evocative prose.

This instalment, a standalone, follows two brothers facing food insecurity and homelessness. After a small act of revenge — the theft of a cross (hence the book’s title) — they are drawn into a tense cat-and-mouse chase with the criminal underworld, including drug dealers and violent thugs.

It’s a propulsive read, but it’s also complex. Fyfe, who wrote the novel as part of his PhD at the University of Western Australia, employs what he describes as a “little known (and very old) structure called a ring composition” (Acknowledgements, page 199).

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Geraldine Brooks, Hachette Australia, Literary prizes, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Memorial Days: A Memoir’ by Geraldine Brooks

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Non-fiction – hardback; Hachette Australia; 224 pages; 2025.

Not having read any of Geraldine Brooks‘ fiction before, I wasn’t overly keen on reading her memoir about the untimely death of her husband, but then it was longlisted for the Stella Prize, and I decided I should just give it a go. It helped that it was available to borrow from my local library and that it was short.

As it turns out, sometimes I could kick myself for not reading certain books because of a preconceived (usually wrong) idea about the author and/or the content. Memorial Days is a brilliantly evocative and emotional read. The Stella Prize judges describe it as “a gift from a writer to a reader”, adding:

As much as this is a grief memoir, it is also the portrait of a long and beautiful marriage. It is a writer grappling with pain and loss and showing it to us saying, ‘this is what it feels like for me, how does it feel to you’?

That assessment is apt.

Along with the beautiful, clear-eyed prose and the often gorgeous sentences that stopped me in my tracks — “I wake before dawn and watch the sunrise silvering the concave curves of the clouds and then turning them roseate, strewing the sky with pink petals” (page 77) — it’s the structure of the book that makes it such a powerful read.

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Miranda Darling, Publisher, Scribe, Setting

‘Thunderhead’ and ‘Fireweather’ by Miranda Darling

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Fiction – hardback; Scribe; 160 pages & 140 pages; 2024 & 2025.

I wouldn’t normally review two books in one post but Miranda Darling’s novellas, Thunderhead (2024) and Fireweather (2025), are a set, best appreciated if read one after the other, so it makes sense to write about them together, too.

Both books are a quietly radical look at marriage, domestic entrapment, societal expectations and mental health. Read back-to-back, they offer a powerful, if somewhat oppressive, account of what it is like to be coercively controlled by the person you should be able to trust most.

They follow the life of Winona Dalloway, a respectable middle-class wife and mother, a writer of romantic fiction who loses her sense of self in a whirlwind of chores, domesticity and child-rearing. (The name is a nod to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but having never read the book, I can’t draw comparisons.)

In the first book, Winona is married to Him (always capitalised and never named), who’s successful and popular in the outside world, but controlling and manipulative within the family home.

In the second book, she’s divorced Him and has custody of their two young boys, but He consistently gaslights her, causing her to doubt her own memory and reality to the point where she begins to lose her mind.

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Literary prizes, Lucy Nelson, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Summit Books

‘Wait Here’ by Lucy Nelson

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Fiction – paperback; Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; 2025.

Wait Here, a volume of short stories by Lucy Nelson, has been long-listed for this year’s Stella Prize.

The judges described it as “virtuosic” and “glistening”, noting the collection’s “incredibly interesting and innovative” use of the short fiction form and the way each story varies significantly in tone, perspective and style. And yet, for me, each felt truly intimate, as if whispered directly into the reader’s ear — and heart.

Largely themed around motherhood, mothering and all the ways in which women who are childfree are judged, seen or set apart, I loved this entertaining, compelling and thought-provoking book. I ripped through it over the space of a weekend and wished I had taken a bit more time to linger over each story, there’s just so much to reflect on.

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Author, Book review, Fiction, Gráinne Murphy, Ireland, Legend Press, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge

‘Winter People’ by Gráinne Murphy

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Legend Press; 272 pages; 2022.

Gráinne Murphy’s third novel Winter People could well have been titled Damaged People, for its three protagonists are all scarred by past events.

Set on Ireland’s wild Atlantic coast — “A place for people whose life had gone wrong on them (location 1417)” — during a single grey winter, it charts the stories of Sis, Lydia and Peter, three strangers who live quiet, secluded lives by the sea.

The novel alternates between their voices in successive chapters, and it’s not until the latter part of the book that the connections between them become clearer.

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Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, historical fiction, John Banville, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Venice

‘Venetian Vespers’ by John Banville

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Faber & Faber; 319 pages; 2025. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It was evening when we arrived in Venice. Sure enough, on emerging from the railway station we found, as I had grimly anticipated, the gathering darkness draped with a dismal, freezing mist, in which the gas lamps along both stone banks of the canal glowed like the puffball-heads of dandelions (location 284).

Venetian Vespers, published last year, is one of John Banville’s standalone novels.

This particular story is historical fiction, set at the turn of the 20th century, and is set in a wintry Venice, which provides plenty of Gothic atmosphere. Indeed, the watery city lends a certain creepiness, giving Venetian Vespers the feel of a Victorian ghost story — or perhaps even a vampire tale.

Reading it brought to mind all kinds of other novels (and films) with a similar ‘feel’ including Dracula (albeit not set in Venice), Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Back (who could forget the little girl in the read coat in the film adaptation?), Henry James’ The Aspern Papers and Wilkie Collins’ The Haunted Hotel, among others.

And yet this is entirely Banville’s own creation: deeply disturbing and slightly creepy but written in lush, wondrous language and, strangely for one of Banville’s literary fictions, which tend to have loose narratives, very neatly plotted and deftly tied up by the novel’s end. I found it a truly rewarding read and felt bereft when I came to the end.

Like many books in his oeuvre, there are familiar themes and recurring characters that dedicated fans will recognise — and which I very much enjoyed spotting! These include a focus on paradoxes, ghosts, twins and doppelgängers, and red-haired characters, usually called Freddie, who may or may not be the devil in disguise.

His complexion was delicately wan, somewhat the colour of buttermilk, his hair was a mass of reddish curls—they might have been a cluster of many small, tightly coiled copper springs—while his eyes were of a shade of sea-green at once intense and almost transparent. His eyebrows were sharply arched at their centre points, which gave him a drolly demonic aspect. […] His thin-lipped smile was a crimson crescent; it was the smile of a rogue, merry and masked and much too winningly plausible (location 727-738).

Narcissism, depravity and violent sexual encounters are also trademark Banville themes present here, so readers must enter at their own risk — you have been warned.

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Author, Book review, Fiction, Fleet, literary fiction, New York, Northern Ireland, Phil Harrison, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge

‘The First Day’ by Phil Harrison

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Fiction – paperback; Fleet; 224 pages; 2018.

Don’t you love it when you pick up a book knowing next to nothing about it and then get completely swept up in the story that, before you know it, you have devoured half of it and don’t understand where the time has gone?

Phil Harrison’s debut novel, The First Day, gripped me from the start. Harrison is a Belfast screenwriter, and while this is very much literary fiction, it’s fast and urgent, making it a real page turner.

The story is steeped in a Protestant evangelical world of mission halls, scripture and tight-knit congregations, a setting that would normally turn me right off, but something about the distant, omnipresent perspective, the dry, elegant, almost old-fashioned prose style, and the story itself — an illicit affair between a married preacher and a young woman he meets on the street — kept me on tenterhooks throughout.

Oh, and did I mention the setting? It’s Belfast, circa 2012, when the Troubles are over and the city is still in flux. That in-between atmosphere lends the novel a certain mood, somewhere between gloom and radiance.

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A Year with Iris Murdoch, Author, Book review, England, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Iris Murdoch, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, short stories, TBR 2026 Challenge, Vintage Classics

‘Under the Net’ by Iris Murdoch

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A Year With Iris Murdoch | #IrisMurdoch2026

Fiction – paperback; Vintage Classics; 286 pages; 2002.

I am myself a sort of professional Unauthorised person; I am sure I have been turned out of more places than any other member of the English intelligentsia (page 156).

So says Jake Donoghue, the narrator of Iris Murdoch’s debut novel, Under the Net, the story of a struggling young writer and translator turfed out of his rented accommodation with nary a penny to his name, who must then survive on his wits alone.

Except Jake doesn’t seem to have much common sense, judging by the number of absurd predicaments he gets himself into over the course of this picaresque novel.

These predicaments include — in no particular order — breaking into a hospital, breaking out of a building he’s been locked in, detonating a safe, stealing a famous dog for blackmailing purposes, and getting caught in a political riot on a film set. And that’s just for starters!

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Author, Beatriz Serrano, Book review, Fiction, Harvill Secker, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Spain, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Discontent’ by Beatriz Serrano (translated by Mara Faye Lethem)

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Fiction – paperback; Harvill Secker; 180 pages; 2025. Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem.

At its most basic level, Discontent by Spanish writer Beatriz Serrano could be described as yet another “sad girl” novel, the story of a young woman disenchanted with the life she’s living and unsure how to change it. But that would do this debut novel a disservice, because it is so much more than that.

It’s really an uncomfortably recognisable satire of contemporary office life, where young professionals occupy important-sounding roles that are effectively meaningless, existing more to generate emails, meetings and slide decks than any tangible outcome.

The story is narrated by 32-year-old Marisa, who works at an advertising agency “in a middle management position with employees working under me”. She claims she doesn’t “know how to do anything” and hates what she does, which is “to be nice and sell snake oil” (page 7).

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