The Hurley Maker’s Son

By Patrick Deeley

Transworld Ireland

Patrick Deeley from Foxhall outside Loughrea in Co Galway is best known for his poetry collection, but in The Hurley Maker’s Son, he turns his prose into a memoir that is touching and poignant.

It’s 1978, on a September evening. Patrick, who was living in Dublin at the time, learns his father has been in an accident cutting trees near Athlone.

As he begins to grieve his father’s death, he reflects on the life of the hurley maker and furniture craftsman against a background of a rural life.

Such memories are unique to Deeley’s life but are placed within a setting that many readers of Irish Country Living would be familiar with: life on a small farm, the manual labour, gruff words of praise and tender memories of family connection.

Deeley is honest in his memories. He doesn’t sugar-coat the arguments that evolved while his father taught him his craft, nor does he hide his anguish or shock at the man’s untimely death. Captivating, Deeley instantly draws you into the Irish ritual of death, and his rhythmic prose ensures you’ll keep turning the page right until the end.

The Privileged

By Emily Hourican

Hachette Ireland

Readers may be familiar with Emily Hourican, who over the last year wrote a very honest account of her battle with cancer in the Irish Independent.

Now she has taken the pen to a different style of writing, with her first fiction book, The Privileged.

The story itself may sound familiar: a group of girls become friendly at secondary school and follow the same path to university.

Through university lectures, drunken nights, first loves and sexual encounters, they have a bond that is unbreakable.

Now however, they live completely different lives. While Laura struggles as a journalist in Dublin, Stella is a successful lawyer in New York, and Amanda who seemed to have it all in London is now broken.

Then a phone call comes that brings them together, back to that end-of-year party in college that changed things forever. There is a fantastic twist to this story, which shows how just one night, one decision can decide the future.

The Heart of Everything

By Henrietta McKervey

Hachette Ireland

Here in Irish Country Living, we were big fans of Henrietta McKervey’s first novel, What Becomes Of Us.

So when we saw her second book had already been published, we expected big things of McKervey, and she didn’t disappoint – especially with the main character Mags Jensen, a mother of three adults who has spent her life in the suburbs of Dublin.

When we meet Mags, it is just another morning, as she prepares for the day ahead, making lists, running errands, and spraying her wrists with perfume. She walks out her front door, but that’s where the monotony of the day ends, because Mags doesn’t return, a fact that becomes increasingly worrying for her children, who suspect early-stage dementia is looming.

This concern for their mother is all her children Anita, Elin and Raymond have in common. Mags has been the heart of everything and so, for five days, they put their differences behind them to join forces.

The search however, brings up old tensions, buried memories and the reality of an earlier tragedy that splintered the family as they simultaneously deal with the reality that they may never see their mother again.

Although it is interspersed with humour, this is a compelling novel that gives a real insight into family relationships and the tension that can lie beneath.

Henrietta McKervey more than delivered on our expectations, and fans of the novelist won’t be disappointed.