Reading matters

'The Old Jest' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 158 pages; 1984.

This classic text by Irish writer Jennifer Johnston won the Whitbread Award for the best novel of 1979, the year in which it was first published.

It's set immediately after the Great War in an unspecified village by the sea, a short train journey from Dublin. Here 18-year-old Nancy, an orphan, lives with her Aunt Mary and her invalid grandfather, a veteran of the Boer War. It's summer and Nancy is on the brink of adulthood, excited about starting her new life, but reluctant to bade goodbye to childhood.

Secretly in love with her neighbour, Harry, a city worker who treats her like a younger sister, she knows deep down inside that he will never reciprocate her feelings: he's too busy wooing another villager, the haughty Maeve Casey.

Nancy, naive but headstrong, spends much of her time alone at the beach, where she discovers a secluded hut -- "built by some railway workers many years before, cleverly hidden in among the granite blocks, which protected it from the sea wind" -- that she makes her own.

During one visit she discovers, much to her annoyance, that someone else has been using the hut, and before long she meets the intruder, an older man, in hiding, whom she befriends. And then, one day, he shows her his gun...

'Two Moons' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Headline Review; 232  pages; 1999.

Two Moons is another startling novel by Jennifer Johnston, who  writes in a crisp, clear style reminiscent of so many of her Irish counterparts.

A kind of cross between Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship and Salley Vickers' Instances of the Number 3, this book is part comedy and part family drama, but has an element of spiritual "fantasy" that gives it an unusual twist -- although some readers may find it too "inventive" for their liking.

Essentially it is a story about three generations of women, two of whom live together -- Mimi, the elderly grandmother, and her daughter, the stage actress Grace -- in a house overlooking Dublin Bay.

'The Gingerbread Woman' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Review; 213 pages; 2000.

This beautifully succinct novel tells the story of two lonely 30-somethings, both coming to terms with personal tragedies, who forge a tentative -- and rocky -- friendship, almost by accident, on a cliff top overlooking Dublin Bay.

Clara, a freelance writer and lecturer who lives in a house filled with clutter and an overgrown garden, is recovering from major surgery and nursing a broken heart after a failed love affair in New York.

Meanwhile Laurence (Lar), a teacher from Northern Ireland, is mourning the loss of his wife and 10-month old daughter, who were killed two years' earlier.