Latest news with #TheAtlas
RTÉ News
22-04-2025
- General
- RTÉ News
Eden's Shore - read an extract 10 April
We present an extrract from Eden's Shore, the new novel by Oisin Fagan, the acclaimed author of Nobber and the short story collection Savages. At the close of the 18th century, Angel Kelly, an Irishman, sets sail from Liverpool aboard The Atlas with the intention of creating a Utopian commune in Brazil. But when a mutiny takes place aboard the ship, he finds himself stranded upon the coast of an unnamed Spanish colony in Latin America... From its erratic trajectory, Lafcadio suspected the vessel in the distance to be a Hollow One, a ship unmanned by war, plague or tempest. If such was the case, he would send a party to board her, salvage what they might, requisition the log, and scuttle her, wearing scarves over their mouths to protect them from any noxious fevers therein. He ordered Quentin Cricklow to keep an eye on it, but then spent the rest of the day watching it himself. Once, in his youth, he had boarded a Dutch frigate that had been drifting along the coast of Senegal, weighted down by an acreage of barnacles, swarmed by a froth of diverse fishes, and dragging after her densely woven reams of seaweed. He had been the first to board, then; had hauled himself up by a knotted rope grappled to a cleat and spilled aboard. His boots echoed out across empty, tomblike decks. He rifled through defunct instruments; incomplete maps; rusted astrolabes; blunted, demagnetised compasses, the points dragging against the markings. The log was unreadable, a dried pool of inky pap; seven strands of blonde hair pressed between its disintegrating pages. The hold carried an algaed lagoon. Wind moaned through enormous holes in the sails. They had fluttered without interruption for more than a decade, by now so coated in salt they glimmered like a cave of crystals broken open to the sunlight. 'Marry, there she is, sir,' Cricklow said. 'If we set the course we should have her steering athwart our hawse afore nightfall.' 'Set it.' More loitering sailors joined Cricklow, passing a telescope amongst themselves. They followed it with their eyes and their ship until dusk, when a Swedish carpenter named Fuchs wiped down his spectacles on his trousers and put them in front of his face, at a good distance from his nose and said: 'No sloop, and she is too small in the hull to be French.' 'Ain't got no hull at all,' Cricklow said. 'Where is her mast?' 'La, she has two,' Cricklow said. By now a crowd had formed that blocked most of the larboard deck. Nearly fifty men had clambered onto hatches, bulwarks, up the rigging. A soft patina of invisible and unfelt rain glazed them. Angel pushed through this gathering, asking: 'Does anyone know where Jacques is, the boy Jacques?' Then he saw what seemed to be an island floating very slightly above sea level, its surface pocked with mussels and blankets of bulbous seaweed that adorned it like loosening flesh. It was something slick and animal, like the submerged hump of some rotting leviathan. An olive tree grew out of it, its trunk seven twisting branches. Grey leaves shivered relentlessly, their lighter underside flickering in and out of vision with the wind, giving the appearance of something trying to become something else; even the bark seemed to crawl with motion. On a low limb, almost hidden behind the latticed mesh of sprigs and leaves, was a small girl, perhaps nine or ten years old. She had her back pressed against the trunk, her arms around her knees, her shawl funnelling the wind. Out of reach of the tree's shade, a pale, one-eyed man had been crucified on the severed upper part of a mainmast. His body swayed constantly with the pitch and roll of the sea. The arms were wide across the spars; a loose shirt flapped across the emaciated body; whips of wet hair plastered across his cavernous cheeks, and his whole face was obscured in shade by a faded tricorne hat which had remained stuck on his head by way of a nail hammered through the top of his skull. 'El jardín,' Hieronimo said. ''Tis a wandering graveyard, la,' Cricklow said. A swell submerged the surface, making it seem like the tree and the crucifix had been discharged, fully formed, from the depths. They tilted back and forth, bursts of whitened water splashing them, and then, like a sigh of release, the bubbling water hissed its way out through the wefts in the seaweed, and then there was the foamy rush of the breaching, the displaced water exploding about it. 'It is the hull of a capsized vessel, in putrefaction,' Lafcadio said. 'It is the fruit of mutiny, only. They have been cast away. This man was the captain, and she must have been—' Angel looked away suddenly, having noticed something terrible. There was a noise above; eyes strained upwards. Jacques hung off a sheet, a figure-of-eight coil around his shoulder. 'No, Jacques,' Lafcadio shouted. 'Look.' He gestured at the crucified man whose head was slouched forward now, the tricorne an inverted black triangle where his face had been; Angel noticed for the first time that the dead man's trousers were flapping wildly, like untethered lines. There were no feet hanging down, the trousers unfilled; only the upper half of a man hung there. 'Get down, Jacques,' Angel called. 'Come down, now.' Jacques cast the rope, and it landed amidst a tumbling clump of black seaweed. 'Prends-la, 'moiselle,' Jacques shouted. The wind rose in an ache; the girl didn't come down from the tree. As the Atlas pushed on, the rope wound its way through the reams of seaweed, its knotted end bouncing, and then it plopped back into the sea, and dragged through the water where it created a white rushing furrow in the form of a cobra's hood. Then they were past it. Jacques looked at the disappointed length of rope in his hands, and then found himself on his back, pulled down by Lafcadio. The first mate knelt over him, and commenced slapping him, open-palmed, across the face. Sailors clustered around them like clotting blood, their faces a mass of indistinguishable shadows in the drab evening. Jacques glanced around, blinking dizzily. 'Sir,' he said. 'A child.' 'A cannibal,' Lafcadio said. He slapped him twice more, and then left off. The tree and the crucifix cast a faint, joined shadow against the water, and then they, too, became shade. Soon all that was visible were two vertical lines rearing thinly out of the sea, a throbbing spot, stalking closely the water, obscured by every slight pitch of the ship. Jacques writhed on deck, his mouth and nose bleeding. 'Angel,' he said. 'Angel, please.' As Angel was moving through the crowd, Lafcadio touched the underside of his chin so he was looking up directly into his face. They stared at each other silently. Eventually, the first mate folded his hands behind his back, stepped aside, and Angel helped Jacques up and led him back to his own quarters.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
10 books to read in April
Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your April reading list. Spring is here, and with it come books that offer groundbreaking ideas to expand our outlook. The nonfiction crop includes an acclaimed novelist's perspective on writing as a person of color, a searing yet carefully documented call for changes in law enforcement and a Latin America-centered history of our hemisphere, not to mention one of the smartest recent collections of cultural criticism. However, those who prefer fiction also have fresh choices. A debut novel examines how a gay Black man copes with family trauma on his wedding eve. A woman and a much younger man meet for lunch in Manhattan, the tensions high but their relationship unknown, while in another book, a fractured family meets in Shanghai around a hospital bed. Happy reading! Gifted & Talented: A Novel By Olive BlakeTor Books: 512 pages, $30(April 1) Blake, known for "The Atlas" series, started out writing fan fiction, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that this standalone fantasy borrows elements from other stories, including dark academia, family dynasty sagas and coming-of-age journeys. The three Wren siblings — Meredith, Arthur and Eilidh — have great supernatural gifts, but when their father dies and leaves his company, Wrenfare Magitech, in need of a new chief executive, their all-too-human rivalries and frailties come to light. Rabbit Moon: A Novel By Jennifer HaighLittle, Brown: 288 pages, $29(April 1) Haigh was on a fellowship in Shanghai where she witnessed so many traffic accidents that she began conjuring a story about an American student named Lindsey, struck down by a hit-and-run driver. Lindsey's parents fly to the Chinese city and fearfully track their eldest's recovery, leaving their younger daughter, Grace, who was adopted from China, marooned at summer camp with no information. Will the family heal or remain estranged? Audition: A Novel By Katie KitamuraRiverhead Books: 208 pages, $28(April 8) Cleanly sliced into two parts, this spare novel of complicated ambitions — personal, professional and familial — pits three people against their perceived places in the world as well as their rarely acknowledged shadow selves. The narrator is an actor worried about her faltering play; a lunch with a much younger man upends her world. In the book's second section, the two lunch again, this time with her husband. In which roles will they be cast? My Documents: A Novel By Kevin NguyenOne World: 352 pages, $28(April 8) The four youngest Nguyen family members didn't anticipate two of them getting interred at a camp set up for Vietnamese Americans in the wake of violent attacks. Siblings Jen and Duncan and their mother are sent to Camp Tacoma, while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions. Nguyen takes historical realities and weaves them into an affecting, and affectionate, story showing one family's ability to resist fascism in all its forms. When the Harvest Comes: A Novel By Denne Michele NorrisRandom House: 304 pages, $28(April 15) Davis, a gay Black man, is about to celebrate his marriage with white bisexual Everett, when his sister brings the news that their father, the Reverend, has died in a car accident. This strict minister paterfamilias disapproved of his violist son, and in the wake of loss, Davis finds solace in music and womanly identity, slowly healing from estrangement. Authority: Essays By Andrea Long ChuFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 288 pages, $30(April 1) Chu writes about culture, all of it, from Octavia Butler's sci-fi to the essays of Maggie Nelson to musicals such as 'The Phantom of the Opera' and on to television, video games, film and, oh yes, notions of gender. Chu employs her considerable expertise to argue that criticism can and should leave behind theoretical nitpicking and address the big, dangerous global issues at hand. Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All By Sandy HudsonPantheon: 288 pages, $29(April 1) The Canadian lawyer, activist, author and producer is now based in Los Angeles, where she is well placed to launch her book about changing the very nature of contemporary law enforcement. Hudson's arguments about how police-related social policies have little basis in outcomes and data are persuasive, and so are her calls for starting small and establishing more human, peaceful methods of keeping the peace. To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other By Viet Than NguyenBelknap Press: 144 pages, $27(April 8) The Pulitzer-winning author of "The Sympathizer" and USC professor here publishes his 2023 Norton Lectures at Harvard that focus on what an outsider brings to American literature. The novelist, who arrived in the U.S. as a child refugee with his family in 1975, elucidates his writerly influences and interrogates the idea that any minority voice might serve as a 'model' for one race or ethnicity. Fugitive Tilts: Essays By Ishion HutchinsonFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 384 pages, $33(April 15) Poet Hutchinson's essays swoosh and roll like the sea that has surrounded and molded his life and art, from his beginnings in Jamaica to his coastal journeys on to his belief that ocean waters ultimately connect us all through suffering and joy. Whether his eye turns to childhood literature like 'Treasure Island,' reggae music, or an Impressionist painting, the author connects his influences to the wider world of art, community and our shared humanity. America, América: A New History of the New World By Greg GrandinPenguin Press: 768 pages, $35(April 22) 'American' history classes often focus on North America and its European origins, but in this long-overdue volume by prizewinning scholar and Yale professor Grandin shows that Latin America's formation and founders are not only important but crucial to the understanding of America overall. Covering 500 years and events from conquests to wars to racism, 'America, América' should be required reading in those history classes. Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
