IN THE COMFORT ZONE

• Author: Martin Doyle
• Published date: 05 December 2020
• Date: 05 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

The Moth and the Mountain

. It's a wild story about a veteran of the first World War named Maurice Wilson who, despite never having climbed anything more demanding than a flight of stairs, decided he was going to fly solo to Everest, and climb the mountain alone. This was 1934, almost two decades before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary finally cracked it; and so, obviously, he didn't succeed - he died half way up - but the story of his failure is far more interesting, to this reader at least, than that of any mere success would have been. Caesar is a masterful storyteller and he imbues this narrative of doomed adventurism with real compassion and intrigue.

I didn't read an awful lot of new fiction this year, but the novel that seems to have most stayed with me is

Earthlings

by the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata. It has a similar affectless eeriness to her previous novel, the wildly successful (and brilliant) Convenience Store Woman, but where that book was all uncanny control, this one is pure, demented abandon. It's not the darkness of the events Murata describes that is most disturbing, but the blank chirpiness of the narrative voice with her narrator relates them. There were times I couldn't decide whether I hated it or whether it was genius, but either way I couldn't stop reading it.

Mark O'Connell's latest book is Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

Danielle McLaughlin Actress by Anne Enright is a brilliant, lyrical, powerful novel. Centred around a mother-daughter relationship and the world of theatre, it's dazzlingly sharp and unnervingly intimate.

Another standout was The Last Day at Bowen's Court by Eibhear Walshe. Set between wartime London, north Cork and Dublin, this reimagining of Elizabeth Bowen's love affair with the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie is richly textured and compelling.

I stayed up until the small hours finishing Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. It begins with a young black woman being falsely accused of kidnapping the white child she's babysitting. It's a smart, funny book that as well as being a page turner explores complex dynamics of race and class.

I loved Cathy Sweeney's short story collection,

Modern Times

, an entertaining and magnificently weird book that buzzes with originality. And staying with short stories,

The Art of the Glimpse

, edited by Sinead Gleeson, is a triumph, a gloriously varied rewriting of the canon of the Irish short story.

Danielle McLaughlin's debut novel, The Art of Falling, will be published in January 2021

Joseph O'Connor

Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick was the book I found myself returning to many times this year. An exquisite collection of essays about Manhattan, friendship, politics, loneliness, social life, private life, it was written long before lockdown but seemed to have much to say on that subject and many others. Donal Ryan's magnificent novel

Strange Flowers

is so beautiful and haunting. Doireann Ní Ghriofa's

A Ghost in the Throat

is a spellbinding work about the connections a great poem can unearth. I found John Banville's novel

Snow

captivating and immensely atmospheric.

I was delighted to see Helena Close become the first Irish writer to be nominated for the Carnegie Medal, for her exceptional YA novel

The Gone Book

.

I never thought I would see a truly readable, edgy version of that tiresome old slugfest

Beowulf

, but thanks to the brilliant translation by Maria Dahvana Headley, we now have one.

Anne Applebaum's

Twilight of Democracy

is a compellingly written, slightly depressing survey of contemporary nationalisms.

Recently I read the proofs of two wonderful books that will be published in 2021: Louise Kennedy's stunning collection

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

and Laura McKenna's powerful historical fiction debut,

Words to Shape My Name

.

...