One family and a country wiped out by famine are the heart and soul of Land, Maggie O’Farrell’s sweeping new novel. The lives of Tomás, Phina, and their children, Liam, Enda, Rose, and Eugene play out on the page with all the verdant vibrancy of the land they love. It's a decade after the Great Hunger in Ireland and Tomás has found much needed work as a cartographer for the ... Read More...
Saoirse by Charleen Hurtobise
A teenage girl in fear for her life steals both money and a passport to get out of the U.S. and into Ireland in the 1990s. This is the beginning of the novel Saoirse, but it’s nowhere near the beginning of the life of Sarah, the main character. That unspools slowly throughout the book as the years pass and Sarah morphs into Saoirse. She goes from a toxic childhood to a woman ... Read More...
Heart, Be at Peace
Two five-stars in one week?! What’s going on over here at The Gilmore Guide? Well, the reviews have been pretty few and far between this summer so I felt like giving everyone another outstanding reading option was the least I could do. I’ve been enthralled by Irish authors for years now and one of my recent discoveries was Donal Ryan. Two years ago I read and ... Read More...
January Reading Wrap-Up
Anyone else have a tough reading month in January? Who knows whether it was because I had so much amazing backlist reading over the holidays or the fact that none of the new January books panned out for me. Either way, I’m not sorry to say goodbye to this first month of 2024. Let’s go February! Tricia joins her husband in Saigon as the Vietnam War begins and has to ... Read More...
Kala: A Novel
Even when it’s a tourist destination on the Irish coast a small town is still just a small town to the teens who live there—a boring place to escape as soon as possible. For the six disparate, but tightknit friends in Colin Walsh’s novel, Kala, teen boredom and energy lead to a prank that goes wrong, starting a domino effect that leaves one of their group missing and their ... Read More...
Juno Loves Legs
With a personality as incendiary and out of control as her flaming red hair, Juno bursts onto the pages of Juno Loves Legs like a wildfire. She and Legs, her best friend, live in a housing estate in Dublin and in an abbreviated 300 pages the novel follows them from childhoods where even home isn’t safe to an adulthood that comes far too fast and too hard. And yet, through it ... Read More...
