Amanda Cassidy signs big book deal
Reviews are Mei Chin on Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens; Tart by Slutty Cheff; The Jackfruit Chronicles by Shahnaz Ahsan; Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever; Jimi Famurewa's Picky; and Strong Roots by Olia Hercules; Tony Clayton-Lea on the best new music books; Declan O'Driscoll on fiction in translation;
Neil Hegarty on Tree Hunting: 1,000 Trees to Find in Britain and Ireland's Towns and Cities by Paul Wood; Maija Makela on Notes to John by Joan Didion; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on Beautiful Lives: How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong by Stephen Unwin;
Ruby Eastwood on Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt; Michael Cronin on Seascraper by Benjamin Wood; Adrienne Murphy on The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun; Oliver Farry on A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine by Chris Hedges; and John Boyne on Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins.
This weekend's Irish Times Eason offer is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, just €5.99, a €6 saving.
Eason offer
Amanda Cassidy has signed a big UK and US deal for her forthcoming novel,
Beautiful Liars
. It will be published as a lead title by Century (Penguin Random House) in the UK and by Putnam in the US, the same publisher behind
Big Little Lies.
Her latest novel, The Stranger Inside, is being published next month by Canelo.
Century fiction publishing director Emily Griffin acquired World Rights to
Beautiful Liars
plus an untitled novel by the bestselling Irish crime writer Amanda Cassidy in a major pre-empt from Diana Beaumont at DHH Literary Agency. North American rights were acquired by executive editor Melanie Fried at Putnam, also in a major pre-empt.
Beautiful Liars
tells the story of an upscale Dublin community rocked by the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl, Saskia, who vanishes during a game of dares in the woods. As tension mounts, three mothers find themselves navigating their worst fears and darkest instincts to protect their children who were with Saskia the night she vanished. These are families who have always used wealth to shield their children from just about anything. Saskia's younger sister, Maude, is determined to find out what happened that terrible night, whatever the cost…
Cassidy is an author, commissioning editor and former Sky News reporter. Her debut novel,
Breaking
, was shortlisted for the 2023 CWA John Creasey Dagger Award. Her third novel,
The Perfect Place
, was an instant
Irish Times
bestseller.
Cassidy said: "
Beautiful Liars
began with my fascination for what really happens behind the closed doors of a seemingly privileged life – where parents will do almost anything to protect their children, especially when they have the means to make problems disappear. I grew up on bedtime stories of Irish folklore that always carried a hint of darkness, so that edge naturally finds its way into my novels. I'd walk the beach near my home in Dublin while sisters Saskia and Maude came alive in my mind. I feel incredibly lucky to have found the dream team at Century and Putnam who immediately understood the heart of this story, and I'm so excited to share it with readers everywhere."
Griffin said: 'From the first page of
Beautiful Liars
I could feel a star quality in Amanda's writing – it is at once propulsive and thought-provoking and full of meaty talking points. Layer by layer, Amanda pulls back the secrets contained within a close-knit community as she explores how far people are prepared to go to protect those they love. Into this addictive narrative she cleverly weaves in Irish folklore and wolves to create a truly unforgettable reading experience. Readers who love Liane Moriarty and Tana French will find themselves instantly under the spell of this novel."
Beautiful Liars
will be published in spring 2027.
*
Longford County Library, Archives, Arts and Heritage Services has announced details of a new competition, Colum for Our Time. The competition is aimed at writers, artists or illustrators in both junior and senior categories. Writers are invited to produce a contemporary take on Padraic Colum's story The First Harp from his collection The Big Tree of Bunlahy, while artists are invited to create new illustrations for the story.
The Big Tree of Bunlahy is a children's short story collection consisting of 13 stories. The title comes from a famous landmark in the village of Bunlahy, where Colum's aunt Anne lived. The junior category invites entries from 12-17 years and the senior category invites entries from those aged over 18 years. The winners will receive €250 each and they will be presented with their prizes at the Padraic Colum Gathering in Granard Community Library on October 4th.
Entries should be submitted to
libraryhqteam@longfordcoco.ie
by midnight on August 31st. For more information, or to request the project brief, application form and a copy of the short story, please email
libraryhqteam@longfordcoco.ie
or call 043-3341124.
*
The third annual Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School will take place at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary, from September 17th-20th. The programme, whose theme is
Political Theatre: Learning from the past?
,
includes talks and readings, scriptwriting workshops and an exhibition by North Tipperary Artists' Collective.
Assistant Professor in the School of History, DCU,
Dr Leeann Lane's
keynote address is titled Hunger strike as republican performativity: Mary MacSwiney, Brixton, 1920, Mountjoy 1922, Kilmainham 1923.
Williams Rossa Cole
, great-grandson of O'Donovan Rossa, will introduce his film, Rebel Wife: The Story of Mary Jane O'Donovan Rossa, and take questions following the screening.
James Moran
, Professor of Modern English Literature and Drama at Nottingham University, will deliver a talk on The playwrights and 1916. The presentation will feature extracts from plays, including
The Plough and the Stars
.
In their discussion Poetry and Politics: Plural Perspectives,
Dr Ailbhe McDaid
and
Prof Eugene O'Brien
, of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, will discuss how poets respond to different political events, and the symbolic (even theatrical) language of poetry to capture the past and current political upheavals.
Tickets are available at this
link
.
*
The 2025 Forward Prizes for Poetry shortlists have been announced.
Renowned for championing poetry at its most innovative, with new voices and internationally celebrated writers alike, the shortlists include British poet laureate Simon Armitage and, for the first time, BSL poetry from Raymond Antrobus and Zoë McWhinney.
The Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000):
I Sugar the Bones by Juana Adcock; Southernmost: Sonnets by Leo Boix; The Island in the Sound by Niall Campbell; Avidyā by Vidyan Ravinthiran; Wellwater by Karen Solie
The Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000):
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali; Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi; Heirloom by Catherine-Esther Cowie; Altar by Desree; Goonie by Michael Mullen
The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written (£1,000):
At Least by Abeer Ameer; Birds of the Arctic by Simon Armitage; A Parliament of Jets by Tom Branfoot; Girl Ghosts by Tim Tim Cheng; Codex© by Nick Makoha
The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed (£1,000):
Dynamic Disks by Raymond Antrobus; Sikiliza by Bella Cox; Where I'm From by Griot Gabriel; Mum Does the Washing by Joshua Idehen; The portrait and the skylight by Zoë McWhinney
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Ireland in the 1980s was bloody awful, but there was at least one good reason not to emigrate
The first play I saw was Macbeth at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It filled me with awe, partly because it was probably very good (the darkly compelling Ray McAnally was in the title role) and partly because I had never before experienced the weird wonder of people being transformed right before my eyes. I was 13 then. I'm 67 now. So I've waited well over half a century for a staging of Macbeth that sent the same quakes up the spine – until I saw Druid 's new version in Galway last weekend. With Marty Rea as Macbeth and Marie Mullen as Lady Macbeth, Garry Hynes 's production is by far the best I've seen anywhere. [ Riders to the Sea and Macbeth: A magnificent horror unbalancing nature Opens in new window ] Which incidentally brings home a truth we too often take for granted: for all the nonsense we have to put with in Ireland, we are a nation blessed in its artists. The church betrayed us. Governments sold us out for a handful of dig-outs. Our banks became casinos. Much of the media became cynical and self-serving. But through it all there have been brilliant creative people holding fast to the hard core of art: integrity in action. Druid's Macbeth, coupled in a typically contrary and radiant gesture with John Millington Synge's great one-act tragedy Riders to the Sea, marks the company's 50th anniversary. Anyone else might stage a birthday party with cakes, candles, balloons and novelty costumes – and a nice, punter-friendly comedy to keep the box office jingling. Druid give us a fearless and ferocious exploration of evil. This is the splendour of the company and of its indefatigable leader Hynes – they never saw a grain they wouldn't want to go against. READ MORE Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen in the 1970s Druid was founded in 1975, but really came into its own at the start of the 1980s. This in itself is a triumph of perversity. The early 1980s were bloody awful. The economy imploded. The agony of the H-Block hunger strikes played itself out like a gala season of nightmares. The abortion referendum was another mad parade of a country's tormented obsessions. Statues were moving and the Virgin Mary was appearing in the Munster skies. A young girl died giving birth in a grotto. A teacher was fired for living in sin and a judge said she was lucky not to be living in a Muslim country where she would be stoned to death. I remember going, in a sceptical mood, to see Druid's production of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1982. Why on earth, in the midst of all these public psychodramas, would a young theatre company want to stage the calcified old drama that had become a national joke? And then being astounded and electrified by what they were doing with it. They were reclaiming Irish tradition, revelling both in its wild poetry and its dirty realism. Druid was emerging as a kind of national liberation movement – liberating the inheritance of Irish art from prudishness and shame, but also from soft charm and wheedling winsomeness. They were making no apologies and taking no prisoners. And it struck me then that, although Druid was not overtly political, it was radically engaged. What it was engaged in was (in Martin Amis's phrase) the War on Cliche. In the North, the great poets ( Derek Mahon , Michael Longley , Seamus Heaney , Paul Muldoon ) realised they couldn't stop the horrors, but they could keep alive a supple, inventive, playful kind of language that stood in opposition to the sectarian cliches that underpinned them. Druid were doing the same thing in the South – creating a living counterculture in which all the suffocating platitudes, banalities and truisms were thrown into the bullring of their tiny auditorium to be skewered and gored on the horns of precise and truthful performance. For myself, the existence of that supercharged space up a lane in Galway was one good reason not to emigrate. Druid were gloriously shameless, but they also shamed the rest of us with their relentless commitment to Ireland, their superbly stubborn belief that a basket case could also be a Moses basket, that a collapsing country might also be a place of pure possibility. Like other Irish artists at the time – from U2 to John McGahern , Eavan Boland and Druid's great collaborator Tom Murphy – they just got on with being world class by being themselves. As Jonathan Swift said when he left his money to build a psychiatric hospital, 'No nation needed it so much.' The late playwright Tom Murphy at the Druid Theatre But I've been using the past tense inappropriately. Druid's 50th anniversary is certainly shadowed by loss. The light of some of those luminous actors – Mick Lally , Ray McBride, Maelíosa Stafford – has been dimmed by death. Jerome Hynes, whose managerial brilliance was equally vital to Druid's growth, died scandalously young. The sudden loss last Easter of Garry Hynes's wife Martha O'Neill hovers over the anniversary celebrations as an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder of the ravages of time. [ Garry Hynes: 'My wife was taken from me in the blink of an eye. My whole life's changed' Opens in new window ] And yet, because Hynes is a great artist, pain and grief are transmuted into defiance. Instead of being a lap of honour, this current Druid production is a magnificent raging against the dying of the light. It is not afraid of the dark. It goes so deep into it you think you have reached its limits – and then it goes further and deeper. Truly great theatre is a hair's breadth from truly terrible theatre. Rea's Macbeth risks monstrosity. Hynes allows him to conjure a vision that would have seemed excessive even a decade ago: pure evil. He makes that vision both timeless and terribly of our time, redolent of Vladimir Putin , Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump without being reduced to any of them. And it is, in a broad sense, that most countercultural thing in contemporary Ireland: profoundly religious – Macbeth as the Antichrist. This is the glory of Druid: 50 years is overture. Hynes is more restless, more edgy, more disconcerting and more masterly than she was when the company started. Druid is not taking a bow. It is still headbutting all our complacencies. We come out of the theatre seeing stars.
