Crowded glasshouseFiction : Nathan Glass, retired insurance salesman, failed husband, cancer survivor, begins his story with the candour that …Sat Nov 26 2005 - 00:00
Cautionary fairy tale for grown-upsFiction: Always wise, usually strange and sufficiently romantic to keep cynics as well as dreamers alert to the closing sentence…Sat Nov 12 2005 - 00:00
The lonely passion of damaged heartsFiction: A young earth-artist exploring the wilds of an island in Lake Ontario for a project about landscape and change, discovers…Sat Nov 05 2005 - 00:00
Surreal stumble through life in drugland suburbiaFiction: How sick, how strange, how disturbingly real - Lunar Park, part crazed joy ride, part modern parable, is a novel you…Sat Oct 22 2005 - 01:00
Transforming dialogue into artFew recipients of the Nobel literature prize have deserved this honour as much as Harold Pinter, writes Eileen BattersbyFri Oct 14 2005 - 01:00
Dispassionate survival in a 'beautiful concentration camp'Fiction: Having spent a year in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a smaller camp called Zeitz, the teenage boy narrator of Imre Kertész…Sat Oct 08 2005 - 01:00
Beijing writer wins Frank O'Connor short story awardA Chinese writer from Beijing, who arrived in the US in 1996 to study medicine and has since settled in California to write, …Mon Sept 26 2005 - 01:00
Walking among the deadFiction: Every big city has its cast of ghosts and lost souls, and that's only counting the livingSat Sept 17 2005 - 01:00
Random musings of a self-indulgent showmanFiction: Sex and bits of history, popular culture, classical references and many nods to Scheherazade, not forgetting tough-…Sat Sept 10 2005 - 01:00
Castration, terrorism and crushingly dense proseFiction: A young man, already wounded by love, picks up a political pamphlet and reads: "The nature of the true revolutionary…Sat Aug 27 2005 - 01:00
Slow lives overtaken by timeFiction : In the space of a second, a life can be altered forever, as Paul Rayment discovers in Slow ManSat Aug 20 2005 - 01:00
Getting real about doomed romanceFiction: A love affair played out in three acts should ideally end in the tragic death of one, or both, of the loversSat Aug 13 2005 - 01:00
Three Irish writers compete for top awardThree Irish writers feature on this year's Booker longlist, which is dominated by four former winnersThu Aug 11 2005 - 01:00
Strange days have found usFiction: Terrorism is the new Black Death: bombers kill as mindlessly and as randomly as a plague, only far more viciouslySat Jul 30 2005 - 01:00
An Post chooses round towers to celebrate Monuments ActThe 75th anniversary of the National Monuments Act is being celebrated by An Post with a set of four postage stamps, each depicting…Thu Jul 28 2005 - 01:00
Mind altering visionsFiction: Restlessness has always been the sustaining life force of Paul Theroux's vicious, sophisticated fictionsSat Jul 23 2005 - 01:00
BEWITCHED: muggles queue for bookThere was no flying blue Anglia car crashing into the great willow tree over looking the riverMon Jul 18 2005 - 01:00
Into a dark, terrifying worldFiction: Genuine terror informs the wise and often brutal vision of US storyteller Joyce Carol Oates, who has written so many…Sat Jul 09 2005 - 01:00
Opera lovers savour a la carte Verdi in styleTrue love as the ultimate recipe for disaster, particularly when embroiled with impending financial ruin, honour and fatal illness…Mon Jun 27 2005 - 01:00
Into a weird, wondrous worldShort Stories: In early 2002, British publisher 4th Estate, the same astute firm that introduced ESat Jun 11 2005 - 01:00
Troubled stories amid the TroublesFiction: Not that yesterday's history ever goes completely awaySat Jun 04 2005 - 01:00
Bring on the baroque: Fabio Biondi and Europa GalanteAs the theme of this year's IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses festival is strongly Latin, the Irish debut of the exciting, …Sat Jun 04 2005 - 01:00
Albanian Kadare wins international BookerBOOKER PRIZE: More than an element of the usual suspects shaped the nominations - writers, not individual books, as initially…Fri Jun 03 2005 - 01:00
Trying to connectFiction: A small boy struggles with the sudden death of a father who never came homeSat May 28 2005 - 01:00
Tests for the characters, tests for the readerFiction: Story remains the foundation of fiction, but themes are centralSat May 14 2005 - 01:00
Portrait of a family of survivorsFiction: Everything you ever thought you needed to know about tractors, as well as everything you ever wanted to know about …Sat Apr 23 2005 - 01:00
A long goodbye for the son of a preacher manFiction: A father addresses the man his small son will one day becomeSat Apr 16 2005 - 01:00
Bringing the ease of Chekhov to the contemporary European novelFiction: Memory and its army of ghosts continue to shape the elegiac fictions of Andreï MakineSat Apr 09 2005 - 01:00
Improbable American psychoFiction A mother attempts to make sense of the ongoing horror of a life perverted by her remorseless monster of a sonSat Apr 02 2005 - 01:00
Out from underground in LiberiaFiction: How many times can a life change direction? More than once, and perhaps further twists may be added - or takenSat Mar 19 2005 - 00:00
Desperate couplingFiction: John Updike's 21st novel offers too few glimpses of his genius at workSat Feb 19 2005 - 00:00
A life in a dayFiction: On the eve of a major public demonstration against an impending war, one man can't sleep, but his restlessness has …Sat Feb 05 2005 - 00:00
From the fantastical to the ridiculousFiction Mysteries are usually exciting, often intriguingSat Jan 29 2005 - 00:00
Powerful polemics motivated by injusticeShort Stories: In a world too full of words, the all- seeing Eugene McCabe emerged as the shrewdest of writersSat Jan 15 2005 - 00:00
From the inferno to paradiseReportage: Ever seeking the lost world he regarded as his true fatherland, that of the vanquished Austro-Hungarian empire, chronicler…Sat Dec 11 2004 - 00:00
Adequate life, big momentsFiction Few narrators are as candid as Liz Dunn; aged 42, living alone, and freely admitting to being lonelySat Dec 04 2004 - 00:00
The slight stuff Maverick satiristFiction There may well be someone, somewhere capable of explaining why it took Tom Wolfe, admittedly a writer of famously inflated…Sat Nov 20 2004 - 00:00
The rake's faltering progressFiction: Venice, 1756, and the hour is midnight on Hallowe'enSat Nov 13 2004 - 00:00
The master badly served by the discipleFiction: Henry James, a great American novelist certainly, but, more importantly, the personification of the career writer who…Sat Nov 06 2004 - 00:00
It runs in the familyFiction: Every family has its problems, but some families are more unfortunate than othersSat Oct 16 2004 - 01:00
A country misled into chaosFiction Perhaps all that history has to offer is the factsSat Oct 09 2004 - 01:00
Magical mystery tourFiction John Segundus, gentleman scholar and magician, has a mission - the revival of English magicSat Sept 25 2004 - 01:00
Toibin makes Booker shortlist for second time with period novelThe Irish writer Colm Tóibín has been shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize for his fifth novel, The Master.Wed Sept 22 2004 - 01:00
Born of romance and painFiction: A pair of tragic lovers battle the disapproval of their families and local society only to abruptly disappear.Sat Sept 11 2004 - 01:00
Witness to the theft of a lifeFiction: A young man recalls a nomadic childhood spent in the company of the flamboyant Maureen, his mother, as she toured Europe…Sat Sept 04 2004 - 01:00
A hard if not long road to Olympic successCian O'Connor's road to Olympic gold has been hard, if not particularly longTue Aug 31 2004 - 01:00
Four-legged Athens hero somewhat overlookedBeneath every gifted rider, there is usually a pretty good horse, in some cases a great oneTue Aug 31 2004 - 01:00
