Isn’t it miraculous that, through the careful and artful combination of words on a page, it’s possible to communicate truthfully something of the essence of what it is to live, to be human?

My second book of 2016 was Academy Street, a debut novel by the Irish writer, Mary Costello.  It’s a short novel – fewer than a hundred and fifty pages of taut, precise prose – that tells the story of Tess Lohan from her childhood days on a family farm in the west of Ireland through to her emigration and old age in New York.  Tess’s life is an unexceptional one, quietly lived, but it’s the great achievement of this novel that you turn its final page and appreciate that there’s no such thing as an unexceptional or quietly lived life.  The milestones of Tess’s life – the death of her mother, the failure of love, the agonies and ecstasies of being a parent, the tiny accumulation of minor disappointments and triumphs – are not much different from any other.  It’s in what we do with what happens that we find what’s distinctive and unique in every human life.

The novel is much like the life it describes: a study in quietude. Its contemplative tone and the spare, measured writing reminded me of John McGahern and Anne Enright.  I was, but only very occasionally, jarred by sentimentality, bu this is a lovely, memorable book, and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next from Mary Costello.