You show me the mouldy, rotting body of yet another Siamese Fighting Fish so we stop drinking and head off. In the pet shop we stop to talk to the yellow and blue macaw which answers to the name Pauline Conway. ‘What a disgrace. It’s too big for that cage. We’d do a better job,’
Every now and then a book comes out that when you read it, your world is changed, whether that is that you’ve just discovered a writer who you now adore, whether it moves you in ways you’ve not been moved before, or that the storytelling is so sublime that the book you believe is destined
He came into the room and he had no idea that he wouldn’t be leaving, at least, not the same way in which he had entered. It wasn’t that kind of room. The kind a person can just up and decide to retreat back the way they came. She was already there. Sitting. Believing. That’s
The blubber-oil lamp flickers against a wall of ice and snow. Illuminated figures loom large like shadow puppets; huge and misshapen. Their dance, dark and muted, whispering from the shadowlands. It reeks like the campfires of my youth, but here the smoke is heavily infused with brine and grease. They begin quietly and without fanfare.
Josephine cooked the fish I did not want as I stood on the back porch smoking. The garden was alive and moved with unusual sounds. The wine tasted like metal on my tongue, cold red, that’s how she drinks it and that’s how it is. Ice ice baby. The forty degree heat sizzled my cool
Just now, while you’re walking through the park, if you look up at the right-hand corner of the third floor of the hospital, you’ll see her, Bryony. You know she’s seen you; she has keen eyes and a sense for the coming and going of things. Back in her early twenties, when she was studying
He arrived on Nathan’s tenth birthday. It wasn’t a shock; it was as if Nathan had been waiting for him to appear all along. It had been a nice day, a little chaotic, but nice all the same. After opening the presents and tucking into a mountain of sandwiches, at three o’clock they cut the
What I love about Gary Buller and his work is that you never know what you’re going to get. Each journey into his fabulously crafted stories and deranged mind, bring with it apprehension and dread, that the words you are going to read will taint you in some way, and for me, that is the
Delving into Diary of a Murderer, one is filled with a curious sense of unease. Despite holding short stories of definite direction and plots, one wanders around inside them as if in a David Lynch movie. We have characters, progressions and plot twists, but they somehow the tone of these stories supersedes their storylines. There
About a year ago, I was at a book launch in Dublin and a card caught my eye as I was leaving. I had my newborn in the pram with me (I figured she wasn’t sleeping anyway, so she might as well come to a book launch). It was coming up to Mother’s Day, and
