Latest news with #LetMeGoMadinMyOwnWay
Scroll.in
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
June global fiction: Six new novels (including one by Stephen King) to read this summer
All information sourced from publishers. Among Friends, Hal Ebbott Amos and Emerson have been friends for more than thirty years. Despite vastly different backgrounds, the two now form an enviable portrait of middle age: their wives are close, their teenage daughters have grown up together, their days are passed in the comfortable languor of New York City wealth. They share an unbreakable bond, or so they think. This weekend, however, something is different. After gathering for Emerson's birthday at his country home, celebration gives way to old rivalries and resentments which erupt in a shocking act of violence, one that threatens to shatter their finely made world. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, Elaine Feeney Claire O'Connor's life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But glimpses of her old life are sure to follow when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby. As Claire is thrown into a love she thought she'd left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself. Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business – Tom's return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house. Never Flinch, Stephen King When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to 'kill thirteen innocents and one guilty' in 'an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,' Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help. Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women's rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate's message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate's bodyguard – a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness. Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston's Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond; mission specialists John Griffin and Lydia Danes; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer. As the new astronauts prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined and begins to question everything she believes about her place in the observable universe. Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant. The Girls Who Grew Big, Leila Mottley Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother's home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone's red truck. The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood. In the Absence of Men, Philippe Besson Summer, 1916. With German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, sixteen and still too young to fight, this moment of dread is also a moment of possibility. An electrifying encounter with Marcel, an enigmatic middle-aged writer, draws Vincent's desires out into the light. As he's taken under Marcel's wing, Vincent begins a dangerous affair with Arthur, the son of his governess and a young soldier on leave. Together, they share a secret that everyone seems to know and yet everyone remains silent about. Vincent is mentored by Marcel, the great novelist, in the city's opulent cafés as they draw the judgment of society. And at night, he hides Arthur in his bedroom as the two risk everything to be together.
RTÉ News
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Book Of The Week: Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney
Elaine Feeney's new novel is a masterclass in Irish storytelling, combining good elements from canonical classics like Anne Enright's The Gathering and John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun with her own intuitive sensibility about the contemporary west of Ireland to deliver a novel which manages to eschew cliché. Yes, there is the familiar 'return of the native' narrative. Yes, there is bereavement, heartbreak and solitude; so much that, at times, protagonist Claire O'Connor's reckoning with her difficult past threatens to tip into sentimentality. But it never does. Feeney leaves enough of Claire's foibles intact - her self-righteousness, her latent gifted school-child predilection for quoting Yeats and Lady Gregory - that we end up encountering a breakdown which feels terrifyingly close to the real thing. Listen: Oliver Callan talks to Elaine Feeney about her new novel Claire is a forty-something writer and lecturer, who has been forced by grief to return from London to the farm she grew up on near Athenry, Co. Galway. Her mother is dead and her relationship with long term English boyfriend Tom is on the rocks. After its initial collapse when she storms out of their shared flat, seemingly for good, she learns that Tom has followed her to a nearby cottage in the west of Ireland; one which has been gifted to him rent-free by a wealthy female patron. "I imagined the kind of woman who… was bright, and perhaps she was scrawny with a thigh gap, smart shoes, minimal jewelry - and before sleep, I wondered, did he f**k her or just pretend to want to?" What makes Feeney's characterisation so refreshing is that she doesn't expect her reader to like - much less root for - her protagonist Differences in grief are rendered sharply from person to person and region to region. In sister-in-law Lara, we have the sophisticated Dubliner's impatient need for closure. In Tom, we have the stiff upper lip English need to endure and keep up appearances. In Claire, Brian and Conor, we have the raw thing - the highs and lows, the jagged rocks, itchy scrub and salty air of emotions so unrefined they could have come out of the land itself - until we're left with nothing less than the near-disintegration of a whole family. Remembering that Tom begins the novel as Claire's long-term boyfriend, his initial detachment from the catastrophe of her mother's death is heightened by the fact that he delivers his condolences by phone call. "Look, I am sure this can't be easy on you," he says. "I can't imagine - Oh sugar, Claire, I am - I'm sorry but I have to run, I'm launching Steve's book in five and they're calling me… Such bad timing." Listen: RTÉ Arena reviews Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way It should come as no surprise that Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is replete with badly-behaved men. Claire's violently abusive father hangs like a dark cloud over much of the narrative, while her younger brother Brian detaches himself emotionally. Her older brother Conor prefers to abuse alcohol as a coping mechanism for loss, such that each sibling becomes illustrative of a different strand of changing aspirations for different Irish classes and generations. Where the ownership of land once represented security and fulfillment for small-holders like Claire's father and grandfather, for the university-educated siblings it is a 'noose' that fastens their ambition. There is even a shrewd reversal of the Mother Ireland trope, where Claire's father becomes so tied up in the land that it eventually leaves him embittered, angry, patriarchal and lonely. He debases his reputation by agreeing to sell a black mare to representatives of Queen Elizabeth II, and when that goes wrong, he unleashes a sustained physical assault on his wife; one we are given to understand is emblematic of the norm. Not that Claire isn't filled with faults of a different kind. What makes Feeney's characterisation so refreshing is that she doesn't expect her reader to like - much less root for - her protagonist; preferring instead to insinuate self-examination from her audience. Claire is so frequently high-minded in her wrongheadedness that all we can do is be compelled; watch as the car crash spins spectacularly over the road, feeling every nauseating turn as it rolls toward conclusion.
Irish Independent
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Elaine Feeney: ‘Every so often, I read something that changes my understanding of the world or myself'
Elaine Feeney is an acclaimed novelist and poet from the west of Ireland. Her debut novel, As You Were, won the Kate O'Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Her new novel Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is published this week by Harvill Secker. The books on your bedside table? I have an ever-growing stack giving me the evils. At the top is The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine, which I'm eagerly anticipating – Erskine's ability to craft empathetic stories about ordinary lives is something I admire. Anna Carey's Our Song is next. I love Carey's YA writing, and am very excited to read it – I have heard from trusted friends that it's brilliant. I'm looking forward to Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje, Caroline West's Wrong Women, David Szalay's Flesh and Sunbirth by An Yu. Roll on summer holidays!
