profil de Kelly Rossiter

Call your Mother, Avril 11 2007

Colm Toibin is a great favourite of mine. His novel The Master was one of those exquisite books that you read slowly so it won't be over. This book of short stories Mothers and Sons is also a work of great depth and beauty. The relationship between mothers and their sons is a complicated and profound one and each story reveals something of the inherent struggle for balance, for love, and for power. This a nuanced book and there is much to think about. In a really strong collection of stories A Long Winter stands out as a particularly wonderful piece. A young man waits for winter to be over to recover the body of his mother who leaves her family to return to the house of her brother,… Lire la suite

The Journey not the Arrival Matters , Avril 11 2007

I loved every minute of this book. The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens had me transported instantly to Ireland. Set at the time of the potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century the book is beautifully evocative. My daughter and I spent some time in that part of Ireland and visited the heartbreaking Potato Famine Museum in Skibbereen, but we were most surprised travelling around the country side to see that there were still small stone dwellings dotting the hills, abandoned and unchanged for the past 160 years. The history of the place is everywhere and the unthinkable poverty and squalor in which these people lived is still evident. The novel follows the character of Fergus as he is… Lire la suite

A new Scandinavian Mystery Writer, Avril 11 2007

I seem to have quite a lot of Scandinavian mystery stories on my reading pile these days. I find them very different in tone from English or North American mysteries. There is a kind of formality and perhaps more civility to them. I'm not sure if that comes from their society or if it is a function of reading a work in translation. The urban mysteries don't have the kind of nastiness and grit you associate with Ian Rankin or Ken Bruen and the small town mysteries don't have the kind of fey charm of something by Simon Brett. There is also a very strong sense of place in most of these novels. This seems to me to be true of The Blood Spilt, the second novel by Asa Larsson. I enjoyed… Lire la suite