Isolation and loss at heart of rural fable
FICTION: This Family of Things , By Alison Jameson, Doubleday Ireland, €19
The unendingly rich seam that is rural and Irish family life is ably mined by Alison Jameson in her fourth novel. The setting is contemporary, but several of the characters – the bachelor farmer, his unmarried sisters, the drunken wife-beating father and his long-suffering wife – are lifted out of being clichéd tropes of a long-gone era by the quality of Jameson’s writing.
At the heart of things are two isolated people. Neither ...