Ireland

Amy said, "I read Anne Enright's novel The Gathering for Ireland in the challenge. Here is a link to my review." Bonnie added, "I want to read the book now, after reading Amy's review, which ends with a fascinating quote."

There are so few people given us to love...We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love anymore. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.

Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most singular voices. The Gathering is a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him — something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations, her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
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Wendy also also thought this was a great book about Ireland. Here's her review.

Ireland

Bonnie said, "A good book for Ireland is The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín. I posted a review of the book last week."

It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora have come together to tend to Helen's brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan's two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself.

Ireland

Jill said, "I just finished my 'Ireland' book for this challenge. It's called Tipperary by Frank Delaney, and I received it as an early reviewer for Random House through www.librarything.com. I did not enjoy this book at all, but people who really, really want to learn about Irish history and have the patience of a saint (perhaps even St. Patrick) may like this book. Personally, I am glad to get it over with. My review is posted here.

Tipperary by Frank Delaney won't be published until November. Here's what Publishers Weekly says about the book:

Seventy-five years after the death of Charles O'Brien, an Anglo-Irish itinerant healer and occasional journalist born in 1860, his memoir is discovered in a trunk. The result is this touching novel from Ireland author Delaney, in which the manuscript's putative discoverer adds his own unreliable commentary to the fictive Charles's probably embellished perceptions, making for a glowing composite of a volatile Ireland. Charles claims to treat Oscar Wilde on his deathbed; advise a young James Joyce ("When you write... be sure to make it complicated. It will retain people's attention"); tell an appreciative Yeats the story of Finn MacCool; and inadvertently bring down Charles Stewart Parnell. He also meets the founders and leaders of Sinn Fein and the IRA, and will, as will Ireland itself, entwine his fate with theirs. And at 40, never-married Charles meets the love of his life, 18-year-old April Burke, an Englishwoman who repeatedly spurns him and exploits him, but who has a large role to play in his life. The narrator claims that his interest in Charles and April is academic, but he eventually confesses that he suspects their stories have some personal relationship to his own. Delaney's confident storytelling and quirky characterizations enrich a fascinating and complex period of Irish history.