Search results for ""Author William Wall""

A startling and gripping novel, Suzy, Suzy follows a teenage girl trying to understand the chaos of her family life. Suzy lives in a dysfunctional household. She can't stand her mother; her father is keeping secrets; and her brother only seems to egg on their parents' erratic and unpredictable behaviour. Alongside her friends, Suzy finds herself drawn into the downward spiral of her parents' relationship, and as a result is drawn into the centre of a mystery surrounding a murder. Forced to make impossible choices, Suzy must navigate the increasingly disturbing antics of her family and the oddities of the mystery she finds herself involved in, while also trying to survive the horrors of secondary school. Narrated by a troubled young woman, the novel weaves a tale of secrets, lies and betrayal in the pressure cooker of her formative years. William Wall is an underrated Irish master with a powerful, distinctive writing style, and an uncanny ability to create astonishingly complex and well-realised female protagonists.

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A startling and gripping novel, Suzy, Suzy follows a teenage girl trying to understand the chaos of her family life. Suzy lives in a dysfunctional household. She can't stand her mother; her father is keeping secrets; and her brother only seems to egg on their parents' erratic and unpredictable behaviour. Alongside her friends, Suzy finds herself drawn into the downward spiral of her parents' relationship, and as a result is drawn into the centre of a mystery surrounding a murder. Forced to make impossible choices, Suzy must navigate the increasingly disturbing antics of her family and the oddities of the mystery she finds herself involved in, while also trying to survive the horrors of secondary school. Narrated by a troubled young woman, the novel weaves a tale of secrets, lies and betrayal in the pressure cooker of her formative years. William Wall is an underrated Irish master with a powerful, distinctive writing style, and an uncanny ability to create astonishingly complex and well-realised female protagonists.

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Joe Lyons has never had much success with relationships until he meets Suzie, a young music teacher. Living a solitary existence as a writer, he's alienated his mother with his autobiographical first novel and has little to say to his stridently religious sister, Mary. Only his father keeps in regular touch. But now, in the warmth of this new love, the happy endings finally seem to outnumber the tragedies. So when news comes that his mother is seriously ill, he returns home, but what he finds there shocks him out of his complacency and Joe, like his father, comes to understand the true nature of love.

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When Kate Holohan’s husband dies suddenly, the extent of his disastrous financial speculation is revealed – together with a mistress and a secret love-nest in the small Italian fishing port of Camogli. Unwilling to take on the ocean of debt and deceit she has inherited, Kate abandons her home and teaching job and flees to Italy in the hope of making a new life. Her new neighbour, Anna Ferrara, is a formidable and mysterious older lady who takes Kate under her wing, teaching her Italian, finding her work and offering her friendship and more. But it will be Anna’s past – as a journalist, writer, former Resistance fighter and a committed communist – that will also challenge Kate and force her to reconsider her responsibilities back home and the values she truly wants to represent. Over three seasons, William Wall conjures the colours, tastes and scents of Liguria, as Empty Bed Blues explores the intersection of friendship, love, language, debt and politics, all told with humour, sensitivity and gold standard storytelling.

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An Irish Independent Book of the Year. As the great John McGahern used to say, there's verse, and there's prose, and then there's poetry; William Wall is a poet in both mediums' John Banville. 'An underrated veteran at the peak of his powers' Sunday Times. 'It's this mood of lives irreparably spoiled that make this bitter-tasting tale so potent' Daily Mail. Grace and her mother and sisters live on an island off the west coast of Ireland. Their father is a successful writer of travel books that advocate a simpler way of life, though he is so seldom there that his family become the subjects of his social experiments and his children's freedom is indistinguishable from poverty. Grace and Jeannie take turns to look after their little sister Emily. Then one day – Grace's day – a terrible tragedy occurs that changes everything. This is novel about a world of adult self-indulgence and the consequences of careless decisions and dishonest compromises.

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In an Ireland far removed from the familiar images of travel brochures, a bright teenager is heading for trouble: son of a single mother who has given up, rarely at school, taking drugs, and hovering on the fringes of the city's criminal underworld. When he falls for Pat The Baker's sister his life changes irrevocably, not least because when she gets pregnant, Pat breaks his legs. But as he tries to make a new start and adjust to being a lover and father, he realises he cannot evade vengeance forever. THIS IS THE COUNTRY is a hard-hitting, tense and deeply moving novel that sets power and corruption against the fragile defences of love, friendship and family. As gritty as it is tender, as funny as it is dark, it tells a riveting tale of survival against the odds.

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