Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream (Chatto & Windus, £20)
Catherine Coldstream’s choice to become a nun (and in a cloistered, mostly silent community at that) appears a most unlikely one as she came from an artistic, academic, non-Catholic background. But a traumatic home life, the death of her beloved father and break-up of her family caused her to seek the consolation of the monastic life. And she loved it for a time: the isolation, peace, silence, contemplation and closeness to nature. But it soured due to cliques, a schism and a power struggle in which she found herself turned upon and even violently attacked. Eventually she took flight — from the monastery, she’s keen to point out, but not from her religious faith. A beautifully written, achingly honest devotional memoir that will live long in the memory.
Old Istanbul & Other Essays by Gerard McCarthy (Irish Pages Press, €28)
This is travelogue with a difference, full of philosophical musings and insights of a thoughtful author on a quest for answers to profound questions. For example, in Istanbul, “the world is wider than any subjective interpretation of it” with “each perspective part of the human story”; in Jerusalem, he refers to “the human drama that has drawn the children of Abraham together in conflict across the generations”; in Cordoba: “In an ideal world, cultural boundaries should be permeable membranes through which the human spirit would flow.” In Granada, he asks “how does one live one’s life?”; he thought, amid the cacophony, “to listen out for a tone, and to follow it, would be the height one could hope for”. The first book of a gifted writer sadly recently deceased.
One Small Step by Michael Flavin (Vulpine Press, £10.99)
The narrator, Danny, is a 10-year-old boy from a Northern Irish Catholic family living in Birmingham, far away from “the Troubles”. Fascinated with science fiction, he wants to be an astronaut and writes stories of space travel with himself as hero. But the terrible pub bombings upend his life. A visitor from Northern Ireland stays in his home in the bombings’ aftermath, leading to the break-up of Danny’s family, unmooring the direction of his life. Characters and dialogue are credible and the 10-year-old’s perspective is mostly well maintained until a friend’s sparking his interest in Che Guevara leads to meditations on the techniques of guerrilla warfare that seem too mature for one so young. Nevertheless, the complexity of life for the Birmingham Irish is well conveyed.
