The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

Canongate €17.54
OZ was paradise for the scientists of the 19th century. But for the people who had lived there for thousands of years, it was paradise soiled, wrecked by the incomers who claimed their land and ruined it.
In Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, a disturbed but brilliant young astronomer with a British expedition learns the language of the Aborigines of Sydney.
As he learns to speak to them, he becomes civilised. So he can choose to do right when he is confronted by his own garrison’s treachery.
The story is based on an actual person - Marine Lieutenant Warwick Dawes, who made the first grammar of an Aborigine language.
But Grenville has made him into the fictional Thomas Rooke, a scholarship boy making a naval career the basis for scientific research.
He’s a lovely character, and Grenville writes him beautifully.
Rooke’s respectful and mutually interested relationship with a brilliant Aborigine child is absolutely charming.
He realises that the Aborigines are using the child to learn as much about him - and the other whites - as he’s learning about them.
And he comes on that dreadful choice: which side should he take when the whites turn on the Aborigines?
It’s a delicate and fine piece of writing - and fascinating if you want to know about Australia and the Aussies.
Publisher's site

Someone Special by Sheila O'Flanagan

Headline Review €12.99
STEP-FAMILIES have been an ideal - in fiction anyway - since The Brady Bunch. You have two, I have two, we have one together, and everyone's ecstatic.
But in Sheila O'Flanagan's Someone Special, the Dolan family regard half-sister Roma Kilkenny as an interloper.
The Dolans are an unusual thing in today's Ireland - the proprietors of a family business.
Stodgy Darragh inherited the reins from his father. The one who should have got the job, everyone feels, is accountant Kathryn.
Half-sister Romy is outside it all; she's in Ireland to mind her mother briefly, but her heart is back in Australia.
I read on, not really knowing what it was all about, apart from the fact that the Dolan-Kilkenny clan were invariably nasty to each other.
A lot of the action takes place in people's heads. It seems a book that might have been much better if the first draft was ditched and a new, sharper one written.
But then you come to the last 100 pages, and the pace speeds up. Suddenly you're whipping through the story, eager to know what's going to happen.
Will Alan, Kathryn's violent husband, drag her back to servitude in America? Will Darragh edge the others out of the firm? Will the warring siblings find each other? I couldn't stop reading.

Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor

Redemption Falls
Joseph O'Connor
(Harvill Secker)


WANDERING through documentary evidence, Joseph O'Connor follows the afterlife of Fenian hero O'Keeffe of the Sword, who led thousands of Irish emigrants to their deaths in the abattoir of the American Civil War.

His fictional O'Keeffe, an amalgam of the real Thomas Francis Meagher, John Boyle O'Reilly and others, is now married to a millionaire and governor of a new territory on the frontier.

Impressive and loquacious, O'Keeffe has two faults: difficulty keeping it in his pants, and inability to speak to his wife without sniping.

Oh, and the drink. And the governorship is a punishment. And the territory is ungovernable, filthy, populated by half-mad war survivors.

Underrunning this is an unspoken scandal - perhaps based on Boyle O'Reilly's notorious attempt to seduce his patron's child in Australia.

Amid all the ruined people are two more ruined. One is a teenage prostitute walking barefoot across the country. The other is her brother, a traumatised child soldier surely modelled on 'Johnny Shiloh'.

At times the story takes light - there's a letter from a 15-year-old soldier ("...only don't let on I said I was afraid..." he pleads to his mother) forwarded posthumously to his parents, then to O'Keeffe with "God forgive you" scrawled across it.

O'Connor has written a powerful book, but a sprawling one. Not a restful read, but an irresistible one.

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