Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe.It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous da...

A bitter January day on the outskirts of a small Irish university town, and Fox, a reclusive researcher, has just received a phone call. His former girlfriend Clara has brought word that his mentor and love rival Stoyte is gravely ill and, what's more, the dying man has some final things he needs to say. Now Fox must set out through the snow and ice to reckon with the ghosts of the past.Poignant, haunting, and absurdly comic, A Mind of Winter is a tale of lost lives, guilt, punishm...

A bitter January day on the outskirts of a small Irish university town, and Fox, a reclusive researcher, has just received a phone call. His former girlfriend Clara has brought word that his mentor and love rival Stoyte is gravely ill and, what's more, the dying man has some final things he needs to say. Now Fox must set out through the snow and ice to reckon with the ghosts of the past. Poignant, haunting, and absurdly comic, A Mind of Winter is a tale of lost lives, guilt, punishment, an...

Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe. It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous day come ...

‘Reading The Failing Heart is like taking a trip; part escape into another consciousness, part suffocating delusion. The story – or rather the scaffolding upon which Smith displays elegant philosophical architecture – follows a young scholar whose mother has just died. Estranged from his father after stealing his money, hounded by the ominous figure of his landlord, and oppressed with images of his ex-lover’s impending labour, he wanders into an existential purgatory. “All these open mouth...

The Failing Heart is a dark, surreal tale set in Dublin. Haunted by the death of his mother and the impending birth of his ex-lover's child, a student embarks on an obsessive quest for knowledge. Abandoning his home, running out of money and increasingly paranoid, the people he encounters and the places he inhabits become mysterious sources of terror and anxiety. Everywhere there are intimations of a world that demands to be known, and yet refuses to yield up its secrets.A contemporary fab...

Since the 1980s, Ireland has gone through a profound social, demographic, and religious disruption, the impact of which has been seen across recent fiction from Irish writers. Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel traces this cultural shift and its impact by examining how modern novels have reckoned with a new conception of Irishness.Despite the heady mix of cultural and social destabilization, reform, and economic successes and challenges, this period of relentless di...

This collection of critical essays explores the literary and visual cultures of modern Irish suburbia, and the historical, social and aesthetic contexts in which these cultures have emerged. The lived experience and the artistic representation of Irish suburbia have received relatively little scholarly consideration and this multidisciplinary volume redresses this critical deficit. It significantly advances the nascent socio-historical field of Irish suburban studies, while simultaneously ...