The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

This book is a version of Sliding Doors, three different scenarios that depend on whether the young man and the young woman get together or not. I don’t know whether it’s old age or not, but I found it hard to follow three sets of stories that were essentially soap opera plots about the worklife, successes, affairs etc of the same group of characters, without getting confused about who was doing what with whom. Because you’re telling similar stories three times, there’s never enough time and space to develop anything other than the Womens Weekly plot. So, entertaining enough but really only good for holidays on the beach when you have no intention of having to engage your brain too much.

The Green Road by Anne Enright

It says on the cover that this woman is the Laureate for Irish Fiction. She thoroughly deserves this recognition. Her work is incisive and truthful and beautifully written. She captures the rhythms of conversation with a perfectly attuned ear. This book is about a difficult mother, getting old, and living in her rambling and quite valuable house in Galway. She reminds me of many mothers, including my own, and frighteningly a bit of myself as well. She’s not nice, she’s not nasty, she’s just human with all the nasty bits and the disappointments and the feelings of love, disappointed or not. Three of her four children have left long ago to live in Dublin and Africa and Toronto. The fourth, whom I find the most interesting, is Constance. She has married well and lives close to her mother, the relationship between them is so like many mother-daughter relationships that it simply has to be drawn from life. Anyway, the four of them come home for Christmas and they bounce off one another like pinballs in an arcade game. I really liked this book because of its truth and its substance.

Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

In the jacket blurb Colum McCann describes this as a poignant book and that’s a pretty good description. This is the story of and young woman and her family during the post WWII period. The characters are quirky in the extreme, people not quite down and out but almost. I didn’t really believe in them in the same way that I would believe in say Anne Enright’s characters – by that I mean I don’t know any people like these characters and their behaviours are a little larger than life - but because of this I was able to distance myself from them and enjoy them probably more than characters with whom I was more emotionally involved. The book is both funny and sad, and absolutely beautifully written. It’s another recommended read from me.