Reading matters

'Lullabies for Little Criminals' by Heather O'Neill

Fiction - paperback; Quercus; 384 pages; 2008.

Quercus may be my new favourite publisher. In recent months I have read several books -- Nefertiti, The Tenderness of Wolves and Bad Debts -- published by this burgeoning publishing house based in London, and so when Lullabies for Little Criminals landed in my mailbox this week -- the result of a mid-week "trolley dash" around Amazon.co.uk -- I decided to bump it right to the top of my incredibly long reading queue.

Despite being longlisted for this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Lullabies for Little Criminals has received little press attention here in the UK. But in its native Canada it has been critically acclaimed, winning the 2007 Canada Reads, an annual battle of the books competition, as well as the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Novel 2007. It  was also shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Awards, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award 2007, the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award 2007 and  the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2007. With such ringing endorsements, I was anxious to see if it lived up to all the hype.

'In the Forest' by Edna O'Brien

Fiction - paperback; Phoenix; 273 pages; 2002.

Set in the countryside of western Ireland, this dark, brooding book is based on a real life triple murder in which a man shot dead three people -- a woman, her young child and a priest -- in a forest glade in 1994. But wounds run deep and O'Brien, who wrote the book eight years later, was accused of exploiting a gruesome crime for the sake of a novel and much vilified for her efforts.

With this is mind, I read In the Forest with some trepidation. But I was gripped from the first page and read the book within a matter of days.

It tells the story of Mich O'Kane, a young boy who gets shunted from one institution to another. Devoid of any motherly love he grows into a fearsome individual that the locals call the Kinderschreck -- a kind of monster -- and eventually goes to jail for a serious crime.

'Personality' by Andrew O'Hagan

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 327 pages; 2003

Maria Tambini, the daughter of Italian immigrants on the tiny Scottish island of Bute, is destined to be a star. She has an amazing voice that captivates anyone who hears it. At the age of 13, she is discovered by a national TV show, and from there, there is no looking back. But the child star, who hungers for fame and glory, also starves herself and before too long, everything is not as it seems . . .

'Star of the Sea' by Joseph O'Connor

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 410 pages; 2003

Stunning! A gripping story set on a New York-bound ship filled with hundreds of refugees fleeing the Irish potato famine in 1847. But this is not the usual "Irish potato famine fare" you might expect. It's a complete reworking, not just of the 19th century disaster that was the famine, but of the naval-based novel and, indeed, the novel in general.

O'Connor's tome is incredibly detailed and multi-layered. There are stories within stories, each one marking a different place on the social spectrum: the cunning criminal; the downtrodden maid looking to start a new life; an American journalist who records it all; and a victimised landlord and his unhappy wife. The beauty of O'Connor's magnificent novel is that each of these vastly different characters is inextricably linked in ways that they will never know.

Star of the Sea is a mesmerising tale that will take readers to new, uncharted territory. It is sad, funny, violent, depressing, grim, shameful, shocking and uplifting. O'Connor, the brother of Irish singer Sinead O'Connor, weaves a wonderful, clever narrative together, swinging effortlessly between past and present, on board the ship and in Ireland. But it's the ending which will leave you gasping for more as you suddenly comprehend how all the different strands of the story have come together without you ever realising.

More please.

'The Mammy' by Brendan O'Connell

Fiction - paperback; The O'Brien Press; 174 pages; 1994

The Mammy is Irish comedian Brendan O'Connell's first book. It's a very simple tale about a widow struggling to raise seven children on Dublin's north side in the late 1960s. Each chapter is essentially a short story centred on the individual characters that make up Agnes Browne's family. There are funny little episodes with not-so-funny punchlines, and the language, studded with 'Dublin-speak', is very stripped back to the point of being boring.

Aside from these faults, it is a lighthearted story — punctuated with pathos — about a family on the wrong side of the tracks, the strength of friendship in trying times, and the essential goodness of people in a more naive era. Apparently the book has been made into a film starring Angelica Houston, and while I haven't seen it, I think it would probably be more entertaining than the novel.