Welcome to Litsy!

I am making an effort to catch up on missed #bookedintime @Cuilin and thought this middle grade fiction might be the way to do it. talk about a not just for children! 3 siblings a year into the blight take to the road after their mother doesn‘t come back from trying to find their dad after the death of their youngest sibling. Life on the road is incredibly hard and starvation is near, yet they also see food being exported. A shameful truth.

Random book from our home library:

📖 On an Irish Island by Robert Kanigel

@TheKidUpstairs tagged me in a post about favorite books from our #AuldLangSpine matches from previous years. It was fun to reflect on books I wouldn‘t have otherwise read without @monalyisha and her matchmaking skills.
2022 @Mitch “The Book of Memory” - Petina Gappah
2023 @TheKidUpstairs “The Colony” - Audrey Magee
2024 @IndoorDame “Foster” - Claire Keegan
2025 @Singout — SO looking forward to digging in to your list next month!

On its surface, this is a book about a self-centered English painter mining an Irish island for his own purposes. At deeper depths, it‘s an exploration of colonialism and relations between colonizing nations. I thought it was fascinating.

#StorySettings #Island

A quiet but challenging book. Two foreigners - a French linguist and an English painter - arrive on a very small Irish-speaking Irish island in the 1970s, each with their own agenda. The story of the island is interspersed with matter of fact paragraphs of incidents from the Troubles. Asks questions about the impact and demands of foreigners on a small community, and how those butt up against the community‘s own needs and desires.

An English artist comes to an Irish island in the midst of the Troubles. A Frenchman arrives to study the Irish language. You‘re drawn into their work and also the lives of the islanders on whom they are reliant, and whose lives they are wilfully upturning. Each chapter is interspersed with brief details of the violence on the mainland which slowly infiltrates the lives of the islanders. Lovely, sobering, witty and heartbreaking in equal measure👇

My read -
Just started this one and am looking forward to the lyrical writing and historical information.

Set in the 1970s on an isolated island in Ireland an English artist, Mr Lloyd, and a French linguist, JP, spend a summer living within the small island community. Both are exploiting the islanders in different ways. Told mainly through dialogues, inner thoughts of the characters and brief news summaries of killings in Northern Ireland, the novel explores colonialism, language, art and the Troubles.

A very well written tale bringing forth themes of neocolonialism, indigenous cultures, and the loss/ negotiations of language and culture. The story is slow but beautifully, sensitively written. Characters are well fleshed out. Narration was great on Audible.