The village is in sore need of a miracle. Struggling under grinding poverty and a greedy landlord, Ballynockanor is the story of a thousand Irish villages where an English usurper is despised by his Irish tenants. When a stranger crosses the river and enters the village on Christmas Eve, Molly proclaims that he is the herald of freedom and change. Is this quiet man the spark that will stroke the fires of Irish nationalism and bring freedom in a troubled time? Or will he bring the destruction of an entire way of life?
'Raw, passionate, hallucinatory. Reading All Rivers Run Free was to be lured by an edgy siren voice of fierce womanhood' Rachel Holmes A woman on the edge of the sea finds a girl on the edge of life. Brittle but not yet broken, Ia Pendilly ekes out a fierce life in a caravan on the coast of Cornwall. In years of living with Bran - her embattled, battering cousin and common law husband - she's never yet had her own baby. So when she discovers the waif washed up on the shore, Ia takes the risk and rescues her. And the girl, in turn, will rescue something in Ia - bringing back a memory she's lost, giving her the strength to escape, and leading her on a journey downriver. It will take her into the fringes of a society she's shunned, collapsed around its own isolation. It will take her through a valley ravaged by floods, into a world not too far from reckoning. It will take her in search of her sister, and the dark remembrance of their parting. It will take her, break her, remake her, in the shapes of freedom. Natasha Carthew is a startling new voice from beyond the limits of common urban experience. She tells a tale of marginalisation and motherhood in prose that crashes like waves on rocks; rough, breathless and beautiful.
For anyone interested in Northern Ireland, its history, its culture, its music.... finally here comes a book that offers a new approach into understanding the complex diversity that has shaped Northern Irish society and its people during the times of the Troubles and beyond. Like poems, songs, in their own right, should be recognised as historical documents. From Mickey McConnells Only our Rivers Run Free and Phil Coulter The Town I loved so Well to Tommy Sands There Were Roses - political & social developments inspired Northern Irish poets and songwriters alike. By incorporating a great amount of background information on the artists mentioned above and resulting from personal interviews with the author a very unique insight into the history of Northern Ireland is given. In addition, the vast amount of songs written from an outsiders perspective and in particular in the Rock and Popmusic Genre such as Paul McCartneys Give Ireland back to the Irish, John Lennons Sunday, Bloody Sunday to James Taylors Belfast to Boston and Katie Meluas Belfast, also required appropriate recognition. Together, all these songs compiled and discussed in this book will provide the reader with a better understanding of Northern Irelands history, its society, its people past and present. Whether it is for further academic research or simply used as reference material for anyone interested in Irish Music and Songs about and from Northern Ireland, this book will remain an essential guide and reference book in years to come.
First Published in 2000, Recording Women documents the work of three leading feminist theatre companies, Sphinx Theatre Company, Scarlett Theatre and Foresight Theatre, through a combination of interviews with theatre practitioners and detailed descriptions of productions in performance. Each of the six productions is innovative in content and style. Scarlett Theatre’s Paper Walls and Foresight Theatre’s Boadicea: The Red-Bellied Queen employ a skillful mixture of text, music, physical performance, humour and seriousness to explore, respectively, domestic abuse and rape (of women and community). Scarlett Theatre’s The Sisters and Sphinx’s Voyage in the Dark adapt existing texts. The sisters is a ritualized re-enactment of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in which only the female characters from the play appear. Voyage in the Dark uses film-noir-like theatrical effects and the insistent rhythms of the tango to evoke the rootlessness and sense of alienation that characterizes Jean Rhys’s novel. Slap (Foursight Theatre) and Goliath (Sphinx) are both one woman shows. Slap, performed by Naomi Cooke, explores images of motherhood, including lesbian motherhood and the concept of virgin birth. Goliath, performed by Nicola McAuliffe, is a dramatization, by Bryony Lavery, of Beatrix Campbell’s powerful study of the 1991 riots in Cardiff, Oxford and Tyneside. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of theatre studies.
A celebration of the tenacious life of the enduring Irish classics, this book by one of Irish writing's most eloquent readers offers a brilliant and accessible survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English, which together have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures. In the course of his discussion of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poems of dispossession, and of later work in that language that refuses to die, Declan Kiberd provides vivid and idiomatic translations that bring the Irish texts alive for the English-speaking reader. Extending from the Irish poets who confronted modernity as a cataclysm, and who responded by using traditional forms in novel and radical ways, to the great modern practitioners of such paradoxically conservative and revolutionary writing, Kiberd's work embraces three sorts of Irish classics: those of awesome beauty and internal rigor, such as works by the Gaelic bards, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, and Joyce; those that generate a myth so powerful as to obscure the individual writer and unleash an almost superhuman force, such as the Cuchulain story, the lament for Art O'Laoghaire, and even Dracula; and those whose power exerts a palpable influence on the course of human action, such as Swift's Drapier's Letters, the speeches of Edmund Burke, or the autobiography of Wolfe Tone. The book closes with a moving and daring coda on the Anglo-Irish agreement, claiming that the seeds of such a settlement were sown in the works of Irish literature. A delight to read throughout, Irish Classics is a fitting tribute to the works it reads so well and inspires us to read, and read again.
Breath-takingly fierce, smart and tender, Only the Ocean is a story of survival, and courage in the midst of darkness that will thrill fans of Patrick Ness and Sarah Crossan The two girls sat at opposite ends of the boat and Kel dug and stretched the oars into the ocean like her life depended upon it because it did. 'Just so you know,' said Rose, 'everything, and I mean everything, is your fault.' Kel Crow lives in a dead-end swamp with her deadbeat family and a damaged heart. But she has a plan to escape. It's a one-two-three fortune story that goes: stow away on the ship, kidnap the girl, swap the girl to pay for passage to America and a life-saving operation. But the ocean is an untameable force, and wrecks ships and plans alike ... Sweet, raw and uncompromising – this is the story of an unforgettable relationship forged on an epic journey.
'Raw, passionate, hallucinatory' Rachel Holmes 'Extraordinary, beautiful and wild allegory for our times' Katharine Norbury 'Hypnotic and powerful' Fanny Blake, Daily Mail A woman on the edge of the sea finds a girl on the edge of life. On the flooded coast of Cornwall, Ia Pendilly ekes out a fierce life in a childless marriage, as rough and stubborn as the sea. When a strange young girl washes up on the beach, Ia's rescue is only the beginning of a dangerous journey - one that will take them downriver, into the fringes of a collapsing society and for Ia, towards something she hopes might be love. A vision of the near-future and an odyssey of motherhood, All Rivers Run Free is a true original from a powerful new voice..
