Novel garners fresh optimism from a ravaged world

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

By Wells Tower

Granta, €13.20

Wells Tower’s debut collection of short stories fizzes with life, from his pitch-perfect descriptions of the natural world to the wealth of damaged characters who inhabit these nine tales.

From Viking marauders, tired of pillaging and rapidly approaching mid-life crisis, to a wheelchair-bound pensioner who mistakes his daughter’s drug-dealing neighbour for a prostitute, Tower’s characters tend towards the down-at-heel, the disaffected, whose lives are ...