What is the acclaimed Irish author looking forward to reading? …
Julia’s debut novel, With My Lazy Eye, won the Bord Gáis Best Newcomer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her memoir, Matchstick Man, an account of living with her partner’s (artist Charlie Whisker) Alzheimers, was published by Head Of Zeus to critical acclaim in 2018. Julia’s latest book, Still, is a memoir of grief following the loss of her mother and was published earlier this year by New Island Books.
“As soon as my book launch is behind me, I plan to read One Boat by Jonathan Buckley. In a former role as editorial director at Rough Guides, Jonathan once made the questionable decision to hire me as a desk editor – a position for which I was spectacularly unsuited, given my terrible sense of direction and deep aversion to travel.
He let me go a year later, a decision that, in hindsight, was entirely justified – and, in a strange way, transformative. Had he not fired me, I likely wouldn’t be working as a writer today.
Buckley, the author of twelve novels, describes himself as drawn to the quiet and the overlooked. His prose is episodic, darkly witty, and quietly brilliant – not unlike the man himself. One Boat was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and is about a woman who travels to a small Greek town after the loss of her father.”
Whether writing about her relationship with her late partner, the artist Charlie Whisker in Matchstick Man, or this new account STILL (New Island, €13.99), about her mother’s untimely death by drowning, Kelly finds new pathways into the human heart with her sideways approach to the maternal relationship, her mother’s life as an individual, as a mother to Julia and her siblings, and as a politician’s wife (Kelly’s father was the late Fine Gael politician and Attorney General John Kelly). A beautifully written book. @edelcoffey
