The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by Knopf on May 13, 2025

A great joy of reading is the opportunity to imagine ways of living that are unlike our own. The Boy from the Sea is a character-driven family drama. The family lives in Donegal during the 1980s. Males in Donegal are expected to fit into a stereotype of working-class men who are stoic and silent, who hold their thoughts and problems close, and who avoid calling attention to themselves. They obey cultural norms that, with some subtlety, govern their responses to social situations.

The men have no idea how to communicate with their wives and children and are afraid that any meaningful attempt to do so will be seen as a kind of weakness or failure. The female characters admire their men and keep a sharp eye on their children to be sure they follow the model their fathers have established. The need to "fit in" and for their children to do so is uppermost in the adult characters' minds.

Ambrose Bonnar is a fisherman, as are most of the men in Donegal. He is respected in the community because he knows his place, keeps his head down, and follows the social rules. His best friend is a fisherman named Thomas. Ambrose is married to Christine and they have a son named Declan. Christine has a sister named Phyllis; their aging and declining father is Eunan. Phyllis made a less fortunate match than Christine and comes to depend on her sister for financial assistance. That dynamic contributes to the drama.

For a time, Ambrose fishes with Thomas; they drag a net fastened to both their boats and split the catch. They make decent money by Donegal standards but times are changing. “No one yet admitted it but the North Atlantic cod fishery was collapsing and there’d soon be next to none.” They resent the ability of other Europeans to fish in their waters but resent even more the restrictions imposed by governments to curtail overfishing.

The partnership ends when Thomas buys a larger and faster boat. Ambrose would like to do the same but learns that Christine has failed to make some mortgage payments because she knows their community’s bank won’t foreclose. The bank might not foreclose but it won’t lend more money to a family with delinquent payments. Ambrose can’t compete with bigger trawlers and fears it is only a matter of time before he will need to stop fishing and join his brothers in England, where other Irish men have fled to find jobs as laborers for pay that isn’t available in Ireland. Ambrose doesn't want to become “the person you had to become to be the kind of person who goes to England,” a change in personality akin to “giving up the drink or finding God.”

The story opens with a local man’s discovery of a baby, floating into the bay in a barrel that has been cut in half and lined with tinfoil. Some Donegal residents suspect that the man actually found the baby on the beach, but his story of wading into the bay to retrieve the barrel is more colorful.

After being passed from family to family for a short time, Ambrose and Christine decide to raise the baby as their own. That decision will spark jealousy from Declan, who doesn’t want to share his father’s attention with a boy who doesn’t share the same blood. Ambrose and Christine name the boy Brendan. Brendan’s true origin becomes a source of gossipy drama near the story’s end.

The boy from the sea becomes a local legend. As he grows, he gives simple blessings to town residents, saying things like “Hopefully things will work out for you.” Not much of a blessing, perhaps, but one that is appreciated by people who value restraint, who mistrust promises and overstatements.

The story offers a few eventful moments (too few to spoil by discussing them here), but The Boy from the Sea is probably not a good choice for readers who are only interested in plot-driven fiction. The novel’s value lies in its depiction of Donegal and its residents. The story is narrated in the third person by an observer using the term “we,” but context suggests that the narrative voice is that of Donegal. It is the collective voice of lifelong inhabitants who share the same perspective on how life should be lived. The community is open to forgiveness of those who stray from its core values, but only when the time seems right. “Life was a sort of procession and we all marched in it together, you had to keep up.”

More precisely, the story seems to be narrated by the men of Donegal. “Donegal men had strikingly big key fobs, we tended to have many padlocks in our lives.” When Ambrose decides that Declan is grown and doesn’t need him anymore, the narrative chorus deems this “a grim way to think and we would’ve told him that had we been the types to meddle.” The men distinguish themselves from the “alternative lifestylers” with shaggy hair and sandals who come from Europe to enjoy the sea. To the men of Donegal, the sea is their life, something to be respected. They have little tolerance for leisure or for those who have time to enjoy their lives.

Garrett Carr paints a sharply focused picture of Donegal residents as people who know their place in the social order, who are intent on not troubling others. When Eunan had a stroke, he was aware of what was happening “but said nothing as he hadn’t wanted to make a show of himself.” If they complain at all, they turn their complaints to the weather or other topics that will not spark controversy. They know their lot in life is to bear whatever misfortune comes their way and they are proud of their ability to do so without complaint.

The women are similar but, in private, are more likely to give voice to feelings of resentment. When Phyllis and Christine watch a documentary about the likely aftermath of nuclear war, they agree that Donegal is too unimportant to be bombed. “Yes, it’ll be nuclear winter for us,” said Phyllis bitterly, “we’ll be expected to put up with it.”

In a beautiful scene, Ambrose and Christine reconnect after Ambrose is nearly lost at sea in the novel’s most harrowing moment. As they explore each other’s bodies, they remind each other about the source of their scars: fishhooks and rope burns for Ambrose, kitchen knives and rescuing Brendan from a barbed wire fence for Christine. Carr collapses lifetimes into those scars. The concept of two lovers reminding themselves of all they have done by revisiting their scars is striking.

Carr’s prose is fluid and strong; his characterizations are insightful. Declan would like to be a chef but he comes to accept that being a fisherman is his destiny. Brendan, having his roots in the sea rather than Donegal, is the character most likely to chase a dream, but it isn’t clear until the novel’s end that Brendan has one.

The ending doesn’t definitively resolve the mystery of Brendan’s origin but it offers a likely answer. It also suggests that fates to which we have reconciled ourselves might be changed if we have the courage not to be governed by expectations. These are powerful themes. As a debut novel, The Boy from the Sea establishes Carr as a writer who merits an audience.

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Twist by Colum McCann

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by ‎ Random House on March 25, 2025

My favorite writers are disproportionately Irish. Colum McCann is high on that list. His prose blends power and lyricism. His books capture larger truths than the small stories he tells.

The character who narrates Twist is a writer. Anthony Fennell tells the reader that after writing two novels he deems “minor successes,” he fell into “a clean, plain silence.” Fennell has become dissatisfied with his life in Dublin. “So much of my recent life had been lived between the lines. All the caution tape. All the average griefs. All the rusty desires.”

Feeling the need to get away, Fennell accepts an assignment to write an article about broken undersea cables. To that end, his editor arranges for him to accompany the crew of a cable repair ship. He travels to South Africa, where he meets John Conway, who leads cable repair missions. Members of Conway’s repair crew tell him that Conway’s biography has unexplained gaps. Intrigued, Fennell wants to learn more about Conway, but Conway is reticent when asked about his past. Fennell uses a phrase from Leonard Cohen to describe him: “Conway had that secret chord — the sort of man who was there and not there at the same time.”

While waiting for a cable to break, Fennell meets Conway’s beautiful partner Zanele, a South African woman who escaped the slums and was educated in the United States. Fennell regards Conway and Zanele as “the South Africa I had wanted to see, a couple crossing the lines, Black and white, the proof of the times, the ancient conventions dissolving.” Before the ship leaves harbor, Zanele departs for London, where she has a part in Waiting for Godot (much to the chagrin of Beckett’s estate, which is enforcing Beckett’s insistence that “the roles in the play were specifically not for women”). Fennell has the sense that something in Conway’s relationship with Zanele is broken but Conway will not speak to Fennell about his personal life until they have been at sea for weeks, when he finally loses patience with Conway's inquisitive nature.

Fennell’s interior voice also frets about his inability to establish a relationship with his “sloe-eyed son.” Fennell hasn’t seen his son, who now lives in Santiago, for five years. For reasons he can’t explain, Fennell denies that he has any children when Zanele asks him about his family. Conway fears that his son feels abandoned, although “his mother had been the one to actually leave, but it certainly felt that I had propelled her.”

Most of the story consists of Fennell’s observation of Conway and speculation about Zanele, mixed with fascinating descriptions of men at work. In addition to learning how undersea cables are repaired, Fennell ponders the international dependence on cables for news and all manner of information, “all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations” — the list of things that travel under the sea continues for most of a page. Fennell develops a sense of wonder about cables and their traffic that a reader might find infectious.

After the groundwork has been laid, Twist takes a twist. All I will say is that Conway disappears, unexpectedly and without warning. Fennell foreshadows an eventful change in Conway’s life when, early in the novel, he explains that he is telling what he knows of Conway’s story to counter the impressions left by “the websites and platforms and rumor mills” that “will create paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts.” Fennell wants to set the record straight, although he can only speculate about Conway’s motivation for actions that earned him a degree of notoriety.

The primary theme of Twist is repair. The story sends its protagonist on a ship that repairs undersea cables, but the journey gives Fennell an opportunity to repair his life. But who is he kidding, he asks himself. “The idea of an actual repair was the sort of soul-destroying bullshit that I needed to strenuously avoid.” At sea, free from the alcohol that usually protects him from the pain of clear thought, Fennell has a chance to consider repairing his own life. What steps he will take, if any, are left for the closing pages.

Conway has a different take on repair. He has come to view repairs as temporary, perhaps pointless. He fixes one cable and another breaks. What good comes from repairing them? He doesn’t feel responsible for the evil that the internet enables, yet he acknowledges that “we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another.”

Conway questions the value of repair when he learns that Zanele has been attacked but is on the mend in England. “Everything gets fixed,” he says, “and we all stay broken.” As Fennell describes Conway’s relationship with Zanele: “They were rupturing. They were part of the broken things. We all are.”

The novel’s secondary theme is turbulence. Heisenberg tried “to mathematically determine the precise transition of a smoothly flowing liquid into a turbulent flow” without much success. The turbulence of life is no more easily explained. “Down below, the turbulence gathered. The Congo had unrecognized depths. All the things we didn’t know. All the things we were doing to ourselves. The manner in which we broke one another.” Conway’s turbulent relationship with Zanele may have been his undoing, the one thing Conway lacked the skill to repair.

Much like Moby-Dick, to which McCann pays tribute, Twist is built upon an ode to the sea. Life originated in hydrothermal vents deep beneath the ocean, but when Fennell comments upon our evolutionary ancestors crawling out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, he does so with humility. The sea is our birthplace yet we understand little of its depths. Zanele laments its use as a dumping ground — more destruction that we may never be able to repair.

Apart from its full characters and thought-provoking story, Twist earns my admiration for McCann’s ability to craft honest sentences with the sharpness of daggers. A few of my favorites:

“At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.”

“Just because the truth is ignored,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be.”

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”

“The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while.”

“Few of the stories we have inside ourselves ever get properly spoken.”

I can spend all day reading McCann and never feel that I’ve wasted a moment. Twist is a strong addition to his oeuvre.

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Galway's Edge by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 4, 2025

Jack Taylor’s life is not quite as miserable in Galway’s Edge as it often seems to be. He takes a few beatings but his dog is left alone. He interacts with nuns but none of them are murdered. Two women break up with Taylor but he doesn’t have to kill either of them. Series fans will understand that any day without the death of a dog or nun or girlfriend counts as a good day for Taylor.

Taylor takes on his usual causes in Galway’s Edge. A vigilante group called Edge that has assisted Taylor in the past is now headed by five people, including a priest. Father Richard, special envoy to the Archdiocese of Galway, Tuam, and Athenry, asks Taylor to find the vigilante priest “and dissuade him of his activities.”

Father Richard thinks “Edge has mostly been a force for good, but lately, its members seem to have drifted off into matters personal, neglecting their purpose. The Vatican feels they are now more of a threat than a help.” Edge got on the wrong side of an Englishman named Benson when it rejected him for membership. He retaliates by doing away with Edge’s members. The church can’t have a British protestant going after Edge, so Father Richard hires Taylor to solve the problem.

Benson gets on Taylor’s wrong side by stealing a jeweled cross from a convent. Taylor enlists a thief to recover the cross and a hacker to make trouble for Benson. Taylor’s actions will doom at least one of those men. They will also doom a promising relationship with a new lover while making him unpopular with a neighbor who is shagging Benson.

Taylor visits two brothers who stole a client’s dog and introduces them to his hurly. He takes on a cop who is beating his wife. He takes on another kiddie fiddling priest. A cancer victim wants Taylor to kill him. In other words, the plot is typical of a Jack Taylor novel: seemingly random events all connect in the end.

Bruen’s unconventional writing style is all about the rhythm he creates with paragraph breaks. Bruen writes wonderful and surprising sentences. My favorite in Galway’s Edge: “I had to dial it back not to smack him in the mouth, but in my experience no good comes of beating the clergy, they keep coming back.”

Bruen grounds his stories in current events and references to pop culture. He quotes song lyrics, sentences from novels, and lines from movies that relate (more or less) to Taylor’s life. Taylor sometimes comments on the news. More often he lets the news sit — thousands of deaths caused by an earthquake in Turkey, a shortage of housing for refugees from Ukraine — to illustrate the larger tragedies that overshadow his smaller ones. There may be no character in crime fiction more tragic than Taylor, but he never loses his understanding that he is living a small life in a big world — and a good life, despite the beatings he takes, compared to earthquake victims or Ukrainian refugees.

I particularly enjoy Taylor’s discussion of the books he’s reading. “I have always found calm, solace, and comfort in books. When my mind is on fire and I’m not quelling it with booze, I rely on books,” he says. I don’t drink much these days, but I can relate to finding solace and comfort in books. I always find entertainment, if not comfort, in Bruen’s novels. Galway’s Edge isn’t as edgy as some, but it’s still a good read.

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Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on May 7, 2024

I’m not always a fan of domestic drama, but I’m a huge fan of Colm Tóibín. He writes about couples in crisis with honesty rather than melodrama. Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn, a continuation of that story of relationship uncertainty in the context of cultural clashes.

Readers of Brooklyn (or viewers of the movie) will recall that Eilis Lacey emigrated from Ireland to America, found a job, endured homesickness, met and married a young Italian man named Tony who was working as a plumber, returned to Ireland to attend her sister’s funeral, and found herself torn between remaining in Ireland (where both familiarity and a young Irishman named Jim Farrell appealed to her) and returning to her husband in Brooklyn. She decides in favor of her marriage, prompted in part by local gossip that makes it impossible to pretend she is single.

Twenty years later, Jim owns a pub in Enniscorthy. He is having a clandestine dalliance with Nancy Sheridan, a widow who owns a nearby chip shop. He has finally worked his way around to proposing, more or less, when Eilis comes back to visit her mother. Notwithstanding his relationship with Nancy, Jim cannot help revisiting the sense of loss he felt when Eilis left for America twenty years earlier.

During those twenty years, Tony and Eilis accomplished Tony’s dream of moving to Long Island. They built a home that was surrounded by the homes of Tony’s siblings and parents. Tony and Eilis had two kids and apparently had a steady marriage until it was rocked by news that Tony made a customer pregnant while fixing her leaking pipes. The customer’s husband wants nothing to do with Tony’s baby and threatens to leave it on Eilis’ doorstep after it is born. Eilis also wants nothing to do with the baby. She refuses to raise it and refuses to go along with Tony’s mother’s plan to raise the child.

After giving Tony an ultimatum, Eilis returns to Ireland to visit her aging mother, who has become no less intolerable during Eilis’ absence. She plans to have her children join her for her mother’s birthday celebration.

Eilis will, of course, encounter Jim. The novel’s drama comes from the choices Eilis must make — return to America and Tony, stay in Ireland with Jim, or return to America with Jim. Jim hasn’t stopped thinking about Eilis since she returned to America, but would he abandon his marriage plans with Nancy to be with Eilis? Would Eilis leave her family in America to be with Jim? The novel builds tension as it seems inevitable that Eilis and/or Nancy will learn that Jim has not been honest with either of them.

This sounds like a soap opera plot, and maybe it is, but Long Island is a character-driven novel that takes a deep dive into personalities that have been shaped by culture and family. Tóibín addresses the restrained emotional turmoil of his characters without resorting to contrivances.

The novel explores the relationship histories of Jim and Nancy as well as their relationship with each other. In a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else, they have been surprisingly successful at keeping their late-night visits a secret. Yet secrets will out. Jim doesn’t want Nancy to know that she is his backup plan if he can’t convince Eilis to leave Tony. Nor does he want Eilis to know that he is sleeping with Nancy. In such a small community, is there any hope that Jim’s secrets will not be discovered?

Jim’s secrecy is motivated in part by the knowledge that Nancy will be subject to gossip if it becomes known that he left her for Eilis. The destructive nature of gossip and the impossibility of keeping secrets in a small Irish village was an important theme in Brooklyn that Tóibín reprises in the sequel.

Tóibín also illustrates how people in relationships attempt to manipulate each other. Nancy, for example, wants to sell the chip shop and become a homemaker after she marries Jim, but she schemes to influence Jim with subtle suggestions until he believes the idea is his own. At the same time, characters are afraid to say what they are thinking, perhaps for fear of another person’s reaction, perhaps because they fear the consequences of speaking their desires into reality. The story ends with a dramatic act of manipulation that different readers might judge in different ways.

The novel’s other key relationship is Eilis’ with her mother. For twenty years, her mother never acknowledged the pictures that Eilis sent of her children. When she arrives in Ireland, her mother doesn’t want to hear anything about her life in America. Yet Eilis’ mother has always nurtured a hidden pride in the grandchildren she never met, even if she has bottled up her emotions and refuses to share them with her daughter. After Eilis’ mother meets her grandchildren, she believes it is her right to turn her daughter’s life upside down.

My first takeaway from Long Island in conjunction with Brooklyn is that every choice we make gives birth to a potential regret about the choice we didn’t make. Or if not regret, at least curiosity about the path life might have taken if we had chosen differently.

My second takeaway is that no matter how we try to make choices that shape our lives, other people make their own choices that alter the course we have planned. We may or may not have the courage or strength to resist those choices. The choices made by others may take on an irresistible force. The inability to take complete control of our destiny might turn out to be a surprising joy or a dreadful peril, but either way, Long Island makes clear that it is a reality of life. As always, Tóibín’s powerful illustration of great truths makes Long Island a captivating novel.

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Galway Confidential by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2024

Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma after 18 months and, within minutes, has his first taste of Jameson. It makes him feel much better.

Jack entered the coma after being stabbed multiple times at the end of A Galway Epiphany. Upon awakening, Jack learns that his life was saved by a man named Rafferty. Rafferty has been visiting Jack after convincing the hospital nurses that he is Jack’s brother. Rafferty has taken an interest in Jack’s life — he explains that he produces a true crime podcast that often features Jack’s cases — and, after Jack's discharge, Rafferty tries to partner with him on a couple of investigations. This will prove to be bad both for Jack and Rafferty, although series fans know that having any sort of friendship with Jack is likely to invite danger.

The plot of Galway Confidential is fairly typical for a Jack Taylor novel, although it might be less shockingly violent than most. A former nun, Shiela Winston, wants to hire Jack to find the rogue who has been killing nuns in Galway. The Guards are doing little to solve the crime spree, as they are overwhelmed with protestors against lockdowns and vaccination policies.

In addition to investigating attacks on nuns, Jack searches out a couple of affluent youngsters who are setting fire to the homeless. Jack also meets up with Quinlan, an associate of Rafferty whose violent approach to problem solving is not as compatible with Jack’s as Quinlan believes.

During his investigations, Jack is contacted by an alcoholic priest. Jack forces the priest to dry out — perhaps an act of hypocrisy for someone who drinks as much as Jack — but again, any association with Jack isn’t likely to end well. The plot threads weave together in ways that readers have come to expect from Ken Bruen.

Bruen has a history of referencing books, television shows, and movies in the Jack Taylor novels. A character in Green Hell explains that the references ground the novels in “stuff” that the reader knows. Bruen makes fewer cultural references than usual in Galway Confidential (perhaps because Taylor has been in a coma and thus unable to consume culture), but he grounds the novel in current events, as well as events Jack missed while he was sleeping: the Brexit disaster, Boris Johnson’s resignation, the Queen’s death, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the influx of refugees into Ireland, inflation and other consequences of the pandemic. The implication is that Jack has good reason to drink.

Jack Taylor novels are quick reads. Bruen’s minimalist writing style tells the story in short paragraphs that surround dramatic moments with quirkiness. Bruen’s notion of a long sentence is: “He had the kind of face that you know has never really been walloped properly but I could amend that.” Dialog is crisp, in part because Taylor rarely speaks unless he can’t prevent himself from responding to idiocy with sarcasm. Galway Confidential is an unremarkable entry in a remarkable series but since every Jack Taylor novel is darkly entertaining, my recommendation is nearly automatic.

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