Laganside Lights by Rosemary Jenkinson (Arlen House, €15)
Rosemary Jenkinson is a prolific writer. Since 2024, the Belfast author has released her debut poetry collection, novel and this, her seventh short story collection. Jenkinson’s writing is energetic. Expect immediacy not contemplation. Desire propels the prose in a collection as varied in geographical location as theme – conserving the Mourne bog lands, chrome mines in Africa, the International Legion at the Ukrainian frontline, singledom, and competition in the Northern literary scene.
Underpinning many of the stories are dilemmas of loyalty, and a moral tension aroused by the decision between doing the easy or the right thing. At times, undercooked endings let down the stories. Otherwise Laganside Lights proves an attractive read.
The Bridge to Always by Lynda Marron (Eriu, £13.99)
A good story, well written is rarer than you might expect. Marron’s sophomore novel – a tale of eros, mania and philia – the destructive and redemptive forces of love – is exactly that. The bewitching, headstrong Maeve and her timid, nine-year old daughter, Emer, move from Dublin to a fictitious Cork town, following the death of the family’s Matriarch, Maeve’s mother. “It’s not the falling you feel, it’s the landing”, observant Emer states, and sure enough the community is in for a land with the pair’s arrival.
The ease and readability of the novel is a credit to the author. This is a complex, compelling, character-driven story, garnished with a healthy dose of “Corkisms”.
TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker: A comic tour de force
Who Will Remain by Kasim Ali: A sociological message delivered through truly propulsive writing
Remember When by Fiona Phillips: An unflinching first-person account of the slide into Alzheimer’s
Everything and the Kitchen Sink by Simon Matthews: A survey of entertainment in pre-Beatles Britain
Wrong Women by Caroline West (Eriu, £14.99)
Monto, in Dublin’s north inner city, was purported to be Europe’s largest red-light district. A melting pot of one square mile, wherein the site of a former Magdalene laundry still stands, this neighbourhood served as much a moral boundary as it did a boundary of geography. Syphilitic decay, gaiety, bully boys, drunkenness, backstreet abortions, mischief, corruption and coercion, West recounts it all, succeeding, despite a destruction of records, to bring the lives of the women of Monto to life.
West approaches the subject with an academic feminist lens, the prose is informative and readable and doesn’t shy from explicit sexual content. As often, a tale of one thing, is a tale of many; Wrong Women makes for valuable social history, both reflecting on the morality of Victorian Ireland and the collusion of forces that sought to disempower its women.
