This week: A tense novel about a girl who disappeared on her way from the UK to Ireland

This week there’s a tense novel about a missing girl who has disappeared on her way from the UK to Ireland. There’s a novel about inheritance in post-war Netherlands. There’s a book that promises to help IBS sufferers. There’s a novel told by a chorus of conflicting narrators and finally, a fictional testimony from the nanny of one of Ireland’s finest painters.

Finding Hannah, MA Purcell, Poolbeg Crimson, €16.99

There’s a new private detective agency just opened in Knocknacloggah, a joint enterprise between retired Garda Detective Thomas Tegan and his colleague Lauren O’Loughlin. As they’re waiting for their first case to arrive, Lauren’s cousin Marina lands in a flurry from London. Marina’s daughter Hannah is missing, and Marina believes Lauren is to blame. She isn’t. But Trout (Tegan) and Lauren obviously need to find Hannah. She’s been spotted boarding the ferry from Fishguard to Rosslare, but this girl subsequently eludes the newly minted pair of private eyes. They discover that someone else is interested in Hannah’s disappearance. Someone with money who has killed before and could kill again. A tense page-turner that keeps you guessing to the end.

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden, Penguin Viking, €18.99

An inherited house and inherited trauma are the fabric of this novel, set in The Netherlands in the summer of 1961. The shadow of WWII still lingers as Isobel finds herself depending on her brother Louis, the family heir, to remain in the family home. She has nowhere to go and so takes her role as ‘safekeeper’ of the house seriously. A creature of routine and carefulness, she’s thrown into confusion when her brother dumps his new girlfriend Eva there, while he flits off to ‘work’. Eva, with her cheap hair dye and cheaper, tight clothes, is everything Isabel is not. Initial hostilities eventually develop into a reluctant form of attraction for the inexperienced Isabel and a relationship of sorts ensues.

But Isabel doesn’t know what Eva has suffered during the war and the discovery will shatter her world. A novel that deftly manages to relate an intimate story tucked into a terrible history of wartime shamefulness, it’s a stunning debut and has been longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Why You Can’t Go, Lorraine Cooney, Gill, €18.99

Figures indicate that there are 800,000 people in Ireland suffering from some variation of gut ill-health and since it’s still a taboo subject, these people are suffering in silence. Our bowel cancer figures have apparently increased by 50%, and 1 in 7 people are suffering from IBS or Crohn’s Disease. Lorraine Cooney is a specialist dietician based in Blackrock Clinic and insists that people with poor gut health can do a lot to help themselves, hence this book. It’s a clear-eyed, jargon-free manual and I imagine it will help a vast number of people.

Mouthing, Orla Mackey, Hamish Hamilton, €17.99

Máirtín Ó’Cadhain’s novel The Dirty Dust and Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart came to mind as I read this story, told by multiple narrators from the fictional village of Ballyrowan. Spanning the early 1960s to the present day, it opens in the aftermath of a monstrous father’s death, his farm now being run by his wife and family. Things finally seem hopeful for the Muldowneys. But then the mother dies and the farm passes to Joe, who allows his unmarried sister, Mona, to stay on. But at a tremendous personal cost to Mona. The parish priest gets involved – at a tremendous cost to him – and on and on the cycle of abuse continues. Refreshingly, the priest is not involved in the abuse, he’s a victim!

Both siblings end up in the County Mental Hospital, but not before there’s considerable damage done.

Ten years on, young Monica Doyle is pregnant and single. She turns to her friend, a novice nun, for help. She’s quickly dispatched to Australia, where she suffers horribly, firstly in giving up her child and afterwards in taking care of her barfly Aunt Kate, and a sourer soul you’d never meet.

‘Intergenerational trauma’ is the current buzz term for hurts and harms passed down through families and Mackey depicts it brilliantly. It seeps down through this tiny, rural community that’s devoid of a love-thy-neighbour ethos, preferring instead to bathe itself unctuously in the long-cast shadows of quiet, vicious Schadenfreude. A brilliant debut.

Francis Bacon’s Nanny, Maylis Besserie, Lilliput, €15.95

First, Maylis Besserie wrote Yell, Sam, if You Still Can, a novel about the final days of Samuel Beckett. Then she wrote Scattered Love, a novel about the possibility (probability, actually) that whoever’s in Yeats’s grave in Sligo, it isn’t Yeats. And in completion of her trilogy about major Irish figures in the arts, she finishes with this magnificent bio of Irish painter Francis Bacon, as told through the eyes of his nanny, whom he took to London and took care of until her death in 1951. He couldn’t afford to do that, but they muddled through. And such an enormous act of kindness and loyalty belies the public image of Bacon as the drink-addled, non-coping, promiscuous bon-viveur who frequently missed commissioned deadlines.

Bacon left Ireland aged 16 and never came back. Given his childhood, nobody could blame him. The son of a sadistic monster of a father and a mother who turned a blind eye, Bacon suffered his father’s savagery until he could take no more. The family nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, witnessed it all and could only look on helplessly and give him the nurturing that neither of his parents were capable of. This story is based half in Ireland and half in London, where Bacon settled. Their two voices are sharply contrasted, Jessie’s and Francis’s, and there are echoes of Max Porter’s esoteric The Death of Francis Bacon in some of the passages. Yet again, this is a marvellous work from the French author, fabulously translated by Clíona ní Ríordáin, and a personal highlight of the fiction works I’ve read this year.

Footnotes

National Heritage Week runs from August 17 to 25t and no matter where you are, there will be something happening nearby. The website heritageweek.ie is fairly sparse, best to keep an eye on your county council Facebook page, along with the pages of your local history and heritage groups.