Authors at Cork World Book fest pick their favourite books
Joseph O'Connor; Sara Bauma; Shane Hegarty: some of the authors appearing at Cork World Book Festival
Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda, a book I first read several decades ago. The characterisations, the setting, the evocation of history, the beauty of the sentences – everything about it is superb. To me, Peter Carey is the Dickens of our era, except he is a better writer than Dickens because his people always seem real.
Niamh Mulvey’s short story collection Hearts and Bones. Crisscrossing Ireland and London in our current era, these brilliantly worked stories engage in clever, witty and subtle ways with the tectonic changes that have disrupted and shaped our times, while suggesting questions about what kind of place we’re in now the old maps are gone. Astute and arresting, this gathering of 10 stories was a book I found unforgettable.
- Joseph O’Connor discusses his latest book, My Father’s House, with Mary Morrissy, 3pm, Saturday, Triskel Arts Centre.
I have roughly a dozen favourite books, and I often add or subtract from this unwritten list. A novel I have long adored is Troubles by J.G. Farrell, which was published in 1970 and won the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010.
The memoir Cells: Memories for My Mother by Gavin McCrea, though “favourite” is a frivolous word for a book that is often harrowing and heart-breaking. McCrea is one of Ireland’s best contemporary authors and all his books deserve to be more widely read.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. When I read this first as a teenager, it blew my mind – and still does every time I read it. This story of a man blundering through the galaxy after the Earth is blown up is funny, twisty, profound and endlessly imaginative. It influenced a generation of writers, but no-one has matched it since.
The Chestnut Roaster by Eve McDonnell. McDonnell's first story was the superb Elsetime, and The Chestnut Roaster is another mix of the historical and fantastical, set in a Paris where almost everyone has lost their memory of a full year – except for a young girl who remembers everything since she was born. It's a beautifully written adventure.
If I’m to think about the work that has had the most profound influence on me, for better or for worse, it has to be James Joyce’s Ulysses – a book that I don’t understand to this day, that I can only re-read in short stretches, that amazes and infuriates me at the same time. In short, it’s a masterpiece.
Recently I read Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini, beautifully translated from the Italian by Alane Salierno Mason. In the book, a young man, a typesetter in Milan, returns to Sicily, an island he left at 15, because his father has abandoned his mother. He comes to a new understanding of his mother from an adult point of view. The novel is a beautiful depiction of Sicilian life in the 1930s. There are biographical elements and the novel is often read as a critique of fascism, but above all it is beautifully written in what Vittorini thought of as an operatic style.
- William Wall’s latest book, Empty Bed Blues, will be launched 7pm, Wednesday, Cork City Library.
AS Byatt’s Possession is about two young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they trawl through old letters, journals and poems a fascinating examination of passion and obsession emerges. I have read it three or four times and every time I am still in awe of what Byatt made. It’s practically four books: a contemporary intellectual mystery; a Victorian love story; and a “collected works” of two very different poets.
Milk by poet Alice Kinsella is a non-fiction meditation on the impossible beauty and impossible strangeness of motherhood. With immersive and exquisite prose, Kinsella leads us through the Mother World and, while her words often evoke the sublime, Kinsella does not ignore the politics of being a mother and an artist-mother in this age of supposed progress.
- Sophie White and Sara Baume in conversation with Eimear Ryan, 8pm, Thursday, Cork City Library.
My comfort read, that I return to again and again, is The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. She’s one of those rare writers that has never written a novel, but her stories are mini masterpieces: minimalist, full of humanity, and very funny.
Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquillity is ambitious in scope and effortless in execution. It takes us from a wealthy dilettante trying to forge a new life in Canada, to a novelist on an endless book tour, to a detective in the futuristic Night City. There is time travel involved. You’ll be thinking about the ending for days.
All-time: Terry Pratchett’s writing has brought me more joy and pleasure than any other. Mostly I read for comfort and his Discworld series (all 41 novels) have – time and again ¬– enhanced my wellbeing. I can’t pick an individual book, but his witches and “police” sequences are favourites.
Recent: Olivia Laing’s To the River is the book I would most love to have written. Her masterly blend of the personal and the universal, meditation and memory, landscape and history is peerless. Ostensibly a memoir around a walk by the River Ouse in Sussex, but it’s so much more: a dazzling paean to solitude and reflection.
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is perfectly formed, layering crime and romance with literary imagery, and for me sets the gold standard, bringing unforgettable characters and location to a gripping, twisty plot. Rebecca herself never appears and the heroine has no first name, yet this is a book you cannot forget.
Grave Expectations is Alice Bell’s hilarious crime debut – Claire Hendricks is a directionless thirtysomething true crime fan working as a freelance medium, assisted by the ghost of her murdered best friend, Sophie. Hired for a party at The Cloisters, they realise the unbearable family are hiding some deadly secrets.
- Sam Blake and Tadhg Coakley in conversation with Michelle Dunne on crime writing’s rise in Ireland, 5pm, Friday, Triskel Arts Centre.
I first read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys as a teenager. Set between Jamaica and England, and serving as a prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, it had a big impact on me, particularly in the way it challenged an existing narrative.
The Night Interns by Austin Duffy, who is an oncologist as well as a writer, is set in a hospital and immerses the reader in the tense and often frightening world of three young surgical interns. Duffy’s writing is taut, vivid, assured: I felt like I was right there on the wards with the characters!
- Danielle McLaughlin hosts Rapid Fire Fiction with special guests multi-instrumentalist Inni-K and Cork actor Kevin Power, 3pm-6pm, Sunday, Cork City Library.
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. It’s the story of the eighteenth-century German philosopher, Novalis, and his doomed love affair with a fourteen-year-old girl. No one writes historical fiction that feels as real as Fitzgerald’s – this is a light-footed masterpiece of wit, intelligence and piercing emotional truth.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken, in which a bereaved daughter tours various London tourist spots she’s visited with her now-dead mother. McCracken’s voice is deliciously sharp, but with as much warmth as asperity, and she’s often laugh-out-loud funny. I didn’t want it to end.
- Carys Davies and David Constantine in conversation with Sarah Harte, 7pm, Tuesday, Cork City Library.
- Cork World Book Fest runs April 15-25: https://corkworldbookfest.com
