B65: When you read a great book....

Books 41 to 48

​So, in my Bucket List quest to read at least 80 books, this is my 6th list of 8 books (actually 10 this time as the first is a trilogy!) that I've held onto.  As explained in my blogs previously, my lists are an eclectic mix of book types.  Hopefully you'll see something that you might read on a rainy day.   (See Blog 16, Blog 22, Blog 32, Blog 38 and Blog 48 for the other book-related blogs).

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41 Seek The Fair Land/ The Silent People/ The Scorching Wind
​... by Walter Macken

Description
Along with The Silent People and The Scorching Wind, Seek the Fair Land is a fascinating examination of the history and events that fuelled the fight for freedom in Ireland.

The first book in a trilogy examining the adventures of several generations of one Irish family.  Set amidst the Cromwellian Invasions, "Seek the Fair Wind" begins in 1641. Dominick McMahon, a merchant by trade, has little appetite for fighting, yet is forced to defend his town against Cromwell's army.  From dark city streets to wild mountains, from vicious slaughter to triumphant faith, from selfish obedience to heroic opposition - this novel paints a vivid portrait of the struggles of the Irish people against the English.

Continuing the adventures of several generations of one Irish family, The Silent People is the story of a young educated man from Connacht, and life at the time of the famine in Ireland. Despite his reluctance, Dualta is drawn into the political unrest of his times because of the degradation of the people by tyrannical landlords and inescapable injustices.

The third book in the trilogy, “The Scorching Wing” is a vivid and memorable novel set in Dublin, 1916, during the Easter Rebellion and the bitter years which followed. Through the diverging lives of two young brothers the agony of Ireland during these harrowing times is witnessed. It is the time of the Sinn Fein, of the dreaded Tans, of terrible deeds and of loyalties strained to breaking-point and beyond.

Reviews
The Irish Trilogy of Seek the Fair Land, The Scorching Wind, and The Silent People may be some of my favourite books. Not just of Walter Macken's, but my all time favourites.  They’re the sort of books that you can read again and again and find something new each time. If you are of Irish descent, you really must find these (maybe on Amazon.com because hard if not impossible to find in bookstores) and read them! – Mary@80b480
No other reviews available.
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About The Author
Walter Macken was born in Galway in 1915. He was a writer of short stories, novels and plays. Originally an actor, principally with the Taibhdhearc in Galway, and The Abbey Theatre, he played lead roles on Broadway in M. J. Molloy's The King of Friday's Men and his own play Home Is the Hero. He also acted in films, notably in Arthur Dreifuss' adaptation of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy of Irish historical novels Seek the Fair Land, The Silent People and The Scorching Wind. He passed away in 1967.

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42          Sky … by Deirdre Purcell

Description
The violent streets of Dublin are farm from the Big Sky country of Montana, but for beautiful and feisty Sky McPherson they are as close as a burning kiss. A stranger from Ireland who claims to be a vacationing schoolteacher lures onto the wildest shores of desire. But then a shocking murder draws her into its mystery and its menace.

And suddenly Sky feels she can trust no one and nothing. Not the man who seems to be all she has ever wanted--nor the passionate pleasure she finds in his arms. Not the official verdict on a woman's horrifying death--nor the authorities who seek to draw a veil of silence over the case. And as she faces a woman's ultimate temptation to love a stranger...and a journalist's compelling need to uncover the truth...layer after layer of dark secrets emerge from the past, to unleash even darker truths--and deadlier dangers...

Reviews
This is a pleasant light read if you’re stuck indoors on a bad weather day – Mary@80b480
“…..Sky is a tauter, tenser affair than her previous books, and all the better for it” – Irish Times
No other reviews available.
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About The Author
Deirdre Purcell (born Dublin 1945) is an Irish author. Purcell is a former Abbey Theatre actress, who has played as Christine opposite Donal McCann in Drama at Inish, Miss Frost in the stage adaptation of The Ginger Man, and Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World. Purcell is also a former TV and press journalist. She has been awarded The Benson & Hedges and Cross awards for journalism. She lived in Beara Peninsula in West Cork.  Since October 2009, she has presented All About the Music on RTÉ Lyric FM. She is a former presenter of "It Says in the Papers" on Morning Ireland on RTÉ Radio 1.

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43  Something for The Weekend ... by Pauline McLynn

Description
When private investigator Leo Street is sent to County Kildare to spy on the wife of a loathsome client, she's delighted to be getting away from rainy Dublin and her hopeless, permanently resting actor boyfriend Barry. The one catch is she has to masquerade as a member of a cookery course and the only piece of culinary equipment Leo can handle is a tin opener - Weekend Entertaining Part 1 is daunting to say the least. As she strips away layers of marital infidelity - not to mention several other scandalous secrets - she battles with bread-making and brûlée. But where will it all end - in triumph or tragedy?

Reviews
A good holiday book. Easy to read and funny in parts – Mary@80b480
 
“SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND'S strength lies in McLynn's witty character portrayal and a very likeable heroine.” - The List - Glasgow

'Packed with lively characters and snappy chat' - Huddersfield Daily Examiner

'Lots of slapstick and character comedy plus an amicable heroine make for a confident, assured read with the right appeal to ensure that we will probably have more entertainment from the bold Pauline McLynn' - Bridlington Free Press
 
About The Author
One of Ireland's favourite comedy actresses, Pauline McLynn is best-known for her role as Mrs Doyle in FATHER TED.  She lives in Dublin.

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44   Sophie's Choice ... by William Styron

Description
In this brilliant, multi-layered novel, a young Southerner, Stingo, wants to become a writer. In Brooklyn, he meets Nathan, a brilliant Jewish intellectual involved in a turbulent love-hate affair with Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman. She has a terrible wound in her past, one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

Reviews
As you might expect from the reputation of both the novel and the novelist, this is no light read neither in its subject matter nor in its literary style. It’s definitely worth sticking with it though. – Mary@80b480

'A masterpiece, [which leaves] more conventional treatments of the Holocaust, such as Schindler's List, looking obtuse and sentimental' - The Times 
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'William Styron's Sophie's Choice is a landmark of mid-20th-century American fiction - an impressively fat novel that most literate Americans claim to have read even if they haven't' - The Sunday Telegraph
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About The Author
William Styron (1925-2006), a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, and A Tidewater Morning. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, the Legion d'Honneur, and the Witness to Justice Award from the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where he is buried.

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45   South Of The Border, West Of The Sun ... by Haruki Murakami

Description
Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch.

Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting, he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears. She is beautiful, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the present.

Reviews
They say that Murakami is one of those authors you either love or hate. I happen to love his writing. I worked for a Japanese company for over six years so that might have something to do with it.  His unique writing style always draws me in as if I’m in the book myself. – Mary@80b480

A story of love in a cool climate, intensely romantic and weepily beautiful...it is startlingly different: a true original ― Guardian

Casablanca remade Japanese style...It is dream-like writing, laden with scenes which have the radiance of a poem ― The Times

This wise and beautiful book is full of hidden truths ― New York Times

This book aches...an eloquent treatise on the vertiginous, irrational powers of love and desire ― Independent on Sunday

Impressively written and structured... Above all, the novel is memorable for its unflinchingly extreme treatment of romantic love ― Times Literary Supplement
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About The Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honours is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.

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46   Star of the Sea ... by Joseph O'Connor

Description
Winter 1847, the Star of the Sea sets sail from Ireland for New York. Among the refugees are a maidservant, bankrupt Lord Merridith, an aspiring novelist, and a maker of revolutionary ballads. Each is connected more deeply than they know. And a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution.

Reviews
I really enjoyed this book. Joe is a great storyteller who uses language beautifully. The story really illuminates conditions during the Irish potato famine in 1847 as well as the conditions aboard the famine ships that travelled from Ireland to North America during that time. In addition, the characters are complex and believable. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of Ireland and emigration to North America. – Mary@80b480

'A triumph...A spectacular breakthrough' - Sunday Times
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'[Joseph O'Connor is] Ireland's most brilliant storyteller' - Independent on Sunday
 
About The Author
Joseph O'Connor was born in Dublin. He has written over eighteen books including the novels Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, Ghost Light, Redemption Falls, and The Thrill of it All, several acclaimed stage plays, two collections of short stories, and hundreds of radio diaries. His novel Star of the Sea became an international bestseller, winning the Irish Post Award, an American Library Association Award, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi, and the Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year. Among his nonfiction books is Sweet Liberty: Travels in Irish America, about a journey he made to all of the towns named 'Dublin' in the USA. His latest novel Shadowplay won the Irish Novel of the Year Award 2019 and was shortlisted for the UK's prestigious Costa Novel Award 2020.

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47   Thanks for the Memories ... by Cecelia Ahern

Description
Joyce Conway remembers things she shouldn't. She knows about tiny cobbled streets in Paris, which she has never visited. And every night she dreams about an unknown little girl with blonde hair.

Justin Hitchcock is divorced, lonely and restless. He arrives in Dublin to give a lecture on art and meets an attractive doctor, who persuades him to donate blood. It's the first thing to come straight from his heart in a long time.

When Joyce leaves hospital after a terrible accident, with her life and her marriage in pieces, she moves back in with her elderly father. All the while, a strong sense of déjà vu is overwhelming her and she can't figure out why …
 
Reviews
An easy and enjoyable read. Perfect holiday read.  Fans of Cecelia Ahern will love it. – Mary@80b480

'The key to Ahern's success is her ability to not just tell a good story, but sprinkle it with plenty of laughs, tears and a little bit of magic' - Mirror

'Cecelia Ahern is queen of the modern fairytale . . . Ahern has given her readers exactly what they want: love, magic, happy endings. And most of all, hope' - Irish Times

‘Unputdownable' - Grazia
 
About The Author
After completing a degree in Journalism and Media Communications, Cecelia wrote her first novel at 21 years old. Her debut novel, PS I Love You was published in January 2004, and was followed by Where Rainbows End (aka Love, Rosie) in November 2004. Both novels were adapted to films; PS I Love You starred Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, and Love, Rosie starred Lily Collins and Sam Claflin.
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Cecelia has published a novel every year since then and to date has published 15 novels; If You Could See Me Now, A Place Called Here, Thanks for the Memories, The Gift, The Book of Tomorrow, The Time of My Life, One Hundred Names, How To Fall in Love, The Year I Met You, The Marble Collector, Flawed, Perfect and Lyrebird.  To date, Cecelia’s books have sold 25 million copies internationally, are published in over 40 countries, in 30 languages.

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48   The Book of Evidence ... by John Banville

Description
Freddie Montgomery has committed two crimes. He stole a Dutch old-master painting from a wealthy family friend and murdered the chambermaid who caught him in the act. Narcissistic, greedy and reckless, Freddie travels through life apparently without remorse. However, as he narrates his testimony, he realises that the only person to be held responsible for his life, and his crimes, is himself. He just can't quite admit it yet . . .

Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, John Banville's The Book of Evidence is a wonderfully dark, insightful and unnerving crime novel that takes us deep into the unreliable mind of an improbable murderer.

Reviews
This is one of the best books I've read, but also one of the hardest - the writing is fluid, the plot pulls you in but I had to take a few sanity breaks to stop myself getting depressed by the evil people can do.  – Mary@80b480

“Banville has excelled himself in a flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita.” -  Observer

“The Book of Evidence is a major work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within. Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people’s souls.” - Don DeLillo

“One of the most important writers now at work in English – a key thinker, in fact, in fiction.” - London Review of Books

“Remarkable. . . If all crime novels were like this one, there would no longer be the need for a genre.” - Ruth Rendell 
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About The Author
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen previous novels including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

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​Bucket List Items Partly Ticked Off in the above Blog post 65
Number 55 - Skills - Read 80 Good Books

Other Blog Posts
Blog 7 - Alice Springs, Australia
​Blog 8 - Adelaide, Australia
Blog 9 - Melbourne, Australia
Blog 10 - Cairns, Australia
Blog 11 - Sydney, Australia
Blog 16 - Books 8 of 80 to read now!

Did you read any of these books?  Which ones?  What did you think of them? 

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