It’s a place I know very well, a place of stone and bog, of heather covered mountains, big skies, and dangerous seas. A sparsely populated wilderness on the westernmost edge of Europe. Connemara has seen more than its share of suffering and its stories often speak of loss, penury, disappointment, exile, and death. Lost in Connemara is a collection of five such stories, printed in both English and Irish and selected by Brian Ó Conchubhair.

The first of the stories, Páidín Mháire, was written by Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882-1928), a relative of my mother and arguably one of the best Irish-language storytellers. His statue (below) used to sit in a prominent spot in Eyre Square in Galway before vandals knocked poor old Pádraic’s head off, forcing the local council to move him to the safety of a local museum. I remember as a child sitting on his stony lap while my mother proudly took pictures of me with our famous relative.

There are some gems in this short collection, notably The precious last days by Pádraic Breathnach. I’m very grateful to Micheál O’Chonghaile, the publisher at Cló Iar Chonnacht, for the gift of this book. It’s so impressive to see the literary traditions of these remote places being preserved and promoted.

Is it courageous or foolhardy to demolish parts of your life to find something more fulfilling, to turn your back on a loveless marriage in pursuit of passion, or to walk away from wealth for a simpler way of living?

Eve Laing, 60 years-old, a celebrated painter, chooses demolition, discarding husband and home as she sets out on the path to a new life and new artistic vision. The backdrop to Nightshade is the London art world and the novel’s story line follows a long night-time journey through the city by Tube and on foot.  I don’t think the author intended this to be a “state of the nation” novel, but to my mind one of its greatest strengths is this particularly vivid sense of place and how it communicates so effectively a feeling of what the UK is like right now: febrile in its uncertainty, fragmented and fractured by inequality and division.

Nightshade is an ambitious novel, preoccupied with sexual equality, gender politics, the posturing and hypocrisy of the contemporary art world, and much more. If that makes it sound stuffy or arid, let me tell you it isn’t. It’s an elegant and thought-provoking read and, especially in its final third, something of a thriller. This is the first novel by Annalena McAfee that I’ve read. I was impressed. And what a gorgeous dust jacket ….

Back in January I wrote here about Parisian Lives, Deirdre Bair’s delightful memoir of her life as a biographer. The following month I visited Paris, one of my final trips before the pandemic gripped the world, and sent a message to Deirdre, knowing how much she loved that city and how many memories it held for her of her times spent with Samuel Beckett and Simone De Beauvoir. We set one date after another for lunch in Manhattan and postponed them all as the city’s restaurants were forced to close. Ten days ago, Deirdre emailed me to say we would “celebrate in happier days”. That celebration and that happier day never arrived. Deirdre died suddenly on April 17th, the very day we had earmarked for lunch on West 44th Street.

I concentrated on Sally Mann’s photographs for the first time a year or so ago when a publisher friend of mine sent me a copy of A Thousand Crossings. Before that I was only vaguely aware of her work and, when I thought of it at all, associated it with the controversy that flared up a few years ago about unsettling images she had taken of her children. I didn’t know she had written an autobiography until it showed up in a recent feature about must-read books.

Hold Still is a memoir of the passions that have driven and consumed Mann’s life. Her children and husband. Gee-Gee, the African American servant who raised her amid the benign indifference and occasional neglect of her natural parents. Photography, of course, and, perhaps the strongest inspiration of them all, the landscape of the American South, that realm of tragedy, conflict, melancholy, and sentimentality to which her life and her art are so deeply connected.

The best books about art lead you to the art itself, and that was certainly the case for me with Hold Still. It made me want to pore over those misty pictures of the fields, rivers, and skies of the American South that are the wellspring of Mann’s inspiration. It took me also to those challenging and provocative portraits of her family, taken with that same intense, unflinching eye.

I’m always wary of hype, so I was on my guard when a friend gave me a pre-publication copy (the cover littered, of course, with breathless reviews from booksellers) of a novel that’s being promoted as one of the “hot” books of 2020, My Dark Vanessa. It’s a story, set in Maine, of a sexual relationship between a 15 year-old girl and her 42 year-old male teacher. Even before it was published, the book was notorious. It was picked as an Oprah Book Club choice and then suddenly dropped, somewhat mysteriously. Accusations were flung around of “appropriation” and plagiarism. All good for sales, of course.

So, what’s it about, this new, hot property? The novel is narrated by the victim, Vanessa Wye. Its chapters mostly alternate between 2000, when Vanessa begins the destructive relationship with her English teacher, Jacob Strane, at an exclusive boarding school in Maine, and 2017 when Vanessa is thirty-two, living alone, still damaged, still obsessed, and still self-absorbed.

On the evidence of this, her debut novel, Kate Elizabeth Russell is a capable and promising storyteller, but My Dark Vanessa is a dull, flat book. Whatever the jacket says, it’s not “dynamite” or “explosive” and it isn’t a “sensation”.  Vanessa and Jacob, victim and abuser, are little more than cyphers, never properly realized and rarely elevated above the level of stereotypes. My Dark Vanessa will, I’m sure, sell very well and have its few weeks of fame because reviewers and feature writers will do their best to present it as titillating and scandalous. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort. Russell had sincere intentions for the book, but lacks the experience to deliver a work that fully realizes those intentions.

A woman opens a bookshop in a small town in Suffolk in 1959. There’s not much more to say about the plot of Penelope Fitzgerald’s lovely story first published in 1978, but don’t be fooled into assuming this is one of those small-scale, minor provincial novels. The Bookshop is a tiny, unforgettable gem. Florence Green’s ambition and independence expose the class tensions, power structures, and sexism of small-town life, but satire and polemic aren’t Fitzgerald’s main business here. The Bookshop is about loneliness and disappointment and how we cope with them, and about how destructive petty resentments can be.

Penelope Fitzgerald was awarded the Booker Prize in 1979 and died in 2000. The Bookshop was adapted into a film in 2017 starring Bill Nighy and others. In one of those strange coincidences, Nighy stood next to me when I bought my copy of the novel in London earlier this year.