Discovering a new writer is still a thrill. I came across Claire Keegan and Small things like these when browsing the tables at McNally Jackson Books in SoHo recently. It’s a novella set in a small town in Ireland in the days leading to Christmas. It’s the 1980s but it could just as easily be the 1950s. The people work hard, go to Mass, respect and fear the Church. Hardship is familiar to many, and even those fortunate to be working are frugal, knowing how quickly fortunes can change.

Bill Furlong, the local coal merchant, is one of the blessed ones. A steady job, a loving wife, five dutiful daughters, Bill has much to be thankful for. But, entering his middle years, Bill is grappling with how to live a good life. Is it enough to count one’s blessings, walk a straight and steady path, work hard and care for his family? Or is a more active form of goodness required, taking risks to help a stranger and a stand against injustice?

On the evidence of this novella, Keegan is working within and adding to a tradition of storytelling very familiar to anyone who follows modern Irish literature, a tradition I associate with the likes of Enright, McGahern, and MacLaverty. Great writers all. I’m already looking forward to reading Keegan’s earlier works next year and keeping an eye out for new books by this talented writer.

Imagine a missile hitting a department store in London in 1944. Imagine the children shopping at that moment with their parents, those young, unlived lives obliterated in that second of heat and noise. It would make a good beginning to a story, wouldn’t it? But how much better would the story be if the tape, having moved forward just a little, could be re-wound and we instead imagine the missile falling a few seconds later or a hundred yards further on. What would happen to those same children twenty, thirty, fifty years later? What would the trajectory of a life have been if the trajectory of the missile had been slightly different? Imagine following those children’s lives knowing that they all grow from a common experience, the moment the bomb exploded (or didn’t explode), the moment the bomb fell on them (or fell safely somewhere else). Wouldn’t the story of their lives be so much more poignant in the knowledge that those lives came to maturity (or perhaps didn’t) because the beginning was ever so slightly different?

This is everyone’s experience. Turn left at the intersection instead of right. Leave the office an hour later or earlier. Buy the red scarf instead of the blue one. How is a life changed by a decision or by the accumulation of an infinite number of decisions? Light Perpetual follows the lives of six children extinguished by that V-2 rocket, lives saved and allowed to take their course over six decades of London history. Time passes. Everything ends. Whatever the choices you make (or don’t make).

Although I’ve read many of his novels over the years and consider him a fine writer, I’ve never been one of those diehard fans that John Le Carré seemed to have in such large numbers. That has nothing to do with the fact that the spy story was his chosen genre. I’m a book snob in some respects, but not in that way. Le Carré was a brilliant novelist, not just a brilliant spy novelist, but I’ve never fully understood his appeal or the reverence he attracted.

Silverview was published after his death in December 2020. It will in some respects be familiar to anyone who has read one of his earlier books, set as it is among the cultured and well educated community of senior British spooks. It’s tightly plotted, meticulously constructed, and absorbing, just like all the Le Carré novels that came before it. But it also has something else – the feel, quite appropriately, of a valediction, a veteran’s farewell not just to the world of espionage, but to the craft of storytelling at which he had labored so skillfully for nearly sixty years.

Dr. Quirke, a booze-sodden curmudgeon who happens to be Ireland’s state pathologist, is taking a vacation with his new wife in San Sebastian when he comes across a young woman he’s certain is an old friend of his daughter. But how is that possible? The young woman had been murdered by her brother in Ireland some time earlier, her body never found. A phone call to Dublin brings Quirke’s daughter to Spain, accompanied by one of Ireland’s finest, Inspector Strafford ….

A story that in the hands of a lesser writer might be a pleasing crime yarn is elevated by the beauty and elegance of John Banville’s prose. Anyone looking for something engrossing and somewhat comforting (well, as comforting as a story about murder, incest, and corruption can be) to read during the holidays could do worse than curl up for a couple of days with April in Spain. Something tells me we have a series in the making here.