Kevin Barry, editor of Town and Country: New Irish Short Stories, believes that, in Ireland at least, this once-mighty form is pulsing with "great, mad and rude new energies". Rozz Lewis posted a suitably energetic response to the collection this week, guiding us through the "far from post-Celtic landscape".
From Nuala Ní Chonchúir's "Joyride to Jupiter", the story of a marriage tested by the worsening of a wife's dementia, to Colin Barrett's "The Clancy Kid" - which she intriguingly dubs as a "typically Irish bromance" - the strength of the book lies for her in its balance of timeless themes with an exploration of a fragile modern culture:
To represent a new Ireland, to try to capture what it is that is Irish now, Barry has presented an anthology that contains many new voices. The book is all the better for this; with these new voices, we get stories about a sometimes confused Ireland.
Elsewhere, broger posted a review of the first volume of Javier Marías's spy triology, Your Face Tomorrow - alongside a promise of more to come on his website. Describing him as an Eliot-like master of "incantatory rhythms and repetition", he explains the suspenseful - and sometimes frustrating - way we are introduced to the world of an Oxford don-turned-spy:
Throughout YFT his narrator insists that one should never 'tell' anyone anything, in a trilogy that's probably longer than War and Peace! There are, however, so many embedded anecdotes, mini-essays and narrative divagations and stories in the sequence that even Sterne would have been impressed. Nothing with Marías is as it seems.
stpauli had more joy unpicking Sophie Hannah's The Orphan Choir. Drawing a parallel to the psychological suspense of The Turn of the Screw, she praised the creation of the story's protagonist:
One of the great successes of The Orphan Choir is the deftly constructed narrative. It's Louise herself who tells the story, and it's often hard for the reader to gauge the state of Louise's mental health - just at is for her occasionally dismissive but ultimately confused husband Stuart.
That's all for this week. If you want to submit your own review of what you've been reading, head to our database and click on the button marked "Post your review". As ever, if your review has been mentioned, send an e-mail to claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you a book from our cupboards.
