CANR
WORK TITLE: Grace
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Lynch, Paul Robert
BIRTHDATE: 5/9/1977
WEBSITE: http://www.paullynchwriter.com/
CITY: Dublin
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY: Irish
LAST VOLUME: CA 354
http://historicalnovelsociety.org/richard-lee-talks-with-paul-lynch-about-his-debut-red-sky-in-morning/ http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/red-sky-in-morning-by-paul-lynch-1.1425979 * https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paul-lynch/grace-lynch/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 9, 1977, in Limerick, Munster, Ireland.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and film critic. Chief film critic, Sunday Tribune, Dublin, Ireland, 2007-11.
AWARDS:Finalist for Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, finalist for Best Newcomer, Ireland’s Bord Gais Irish Books of the Year, nominated for Prix du Premier Roman, Amazon.com book-of-the-month citation, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers citation, Huffington Post book-of-the-week citation, Daily Beast Hot Read citation, and book-of-the-year citations, Irish Times and Irish Independent, all for Red Sky in Morning; Priz Libra Nous for best foreign novel, nominated for Prix Femina, Prix du Roman FNAC, and Amazon.com book-of-the-month citation, 2015, for The Black Snow.
WRITINGS
Contributor to newspapers, including the London Sunday Times, Irish Times, Sunday Business Post, Irish Daily Mail, Film Ireland, and Ireland Sunday Tribune.
SIDELIGHTS
Paul Lynch worked as a film reviewer for the Dublin Sunday Tribune for four years until the paper folded in 2011. He has since published his first long work of fiction, Red Sky in Morning. “I have been a serious film watcher for a long time and that is bound to impact my writing,” Lynch told Richard Lee in an interview for Historical Novel Society. “Way back when DW Griffith was figuring out how to make his first films, he went and read Dickens and learned how to construct a scene. We’ve come full circle and now writers are learning from cinema.” “I’m convinced there is an innate need for storytelling in people,” Lynch told Lee. “The work of Nobel Prize-winning cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman only confirms this is so. And while the modern novel and the postmodern novel abandoned at times that interest in storytelling, and atomized any idea of linear time, I am convinced the post post-modern novel—whatever that is—can learn to reincorporate old-fashioned storytelling again.”
“The novel begins in Ireland in the early 1800s,” wrote Emily Donaldson in the Toronto Star. “Having been unceremoniously evicted from his home, Coll Coyle, a poor labourer, has gone off in search of his landlord to find out why. The encounter leads to a scuffle in which the landlord, a surly, mean-spirited man named Hamilton, falls from his horse and is killed.” Coyle is forced to flee Ireland, pursued by Hamilton’s foreman, Faller. He ends up in rural Pennsylvania digging rail lines—until Faller finds him again. “Lynch creates scenes that are almost nauseatingly hateful and graphic, though rendered in startlingly beautiful prose,” stated Mark Levine in Booklist. Red Sky in Morning, declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, is “a novel of great beauty and violence from Irish writer Lynch. … Lynch’s poetic prose is gorgeous. He lovingly crafts every sentence.”
Other critics also singled out Lynch’s prose for comment, and Lynch revealed in a Daily Beast interview that his composition process requires an intense focus. “I find my writing life is a constant assessment of balance,” Lynch said in an interview appearing in the Daily Beast. “Am I getting enough quietude to think and read and get the work done? Am I being social enough to make sure I don’t go a little crazy? I suspect the writing life has rewired my brain. … I find that Not Writing and Not Thinking are just as important [as writing] because I need to give time for my unconscious to come up with the goods.” “Knowing I have to write, I rise with dread,” the author stated in his Daily Beast interview. “It requires great willpower on my part to go to the desk in the dark of a morning. What helps is to stay focused. Most mornings, as soon as I rise, I meditate for half an hour. When a writer talks about being ‘in the zone,’ they are really in the same place as a meditative state, so meditation trains you to get there faster. After I meditate, I shoot a strong espresso and go to the desk. … I need a very deep concentration to mine the good stuff.” “I am grateful for every day of freedom to pursue this. And yet, the truth is, you can’t treat writing like an ordinary day job,” Lynch told the interviewer for the Daily Beast. “Yes, you should be at the desk every day and keep set hours. Yes, it is all about discipline. But what powers writing is intuition, and intuition gets tired. Writing beats the hell out of it. Sometimes, it is mandatory to let intuition go on holiday, even if it is just to sit about the house reading for a week or two. I have had to learn to be kind to myself.” “Lynch’s prose is sharply observed,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “and his themes are elemental and powerful.” “Here, as is often the case in the work of our own Cormac McCarthy,” stated Alan Cheuse for All Things Considered, “the beauty and force of the language works congruently with the violence in the story.”
In The Black Snow, Lynch tells the story of a Donegal farmer named Barnabas Kane. When his byre catches fire one day, Barnabas orders Matthew Peoples, his farmhand, to enter the structure and save the cattle. Matthew dies in the fire, and the townspeople begin suggesting that Barnabas is to blame. Barnabas also feels enormous guilt, as does his adolescent son, Billy. His insurance has lapsed, so he cannot rebuild his cowshed, thus diminishing his family’s income. Additionally, wasps devastate his wife Eskra’s bees, their horse becomes sick, and household items go missing. An exasperated Barnabas turns to alcohol and anger, sinking into a deep depression.
In a review of the book that appeared in the Toronto Star Online, Emily Donaldson commented: “The Irish author’s gnarled, lustrous prose style is peppered with local vernacular; his literary sensibility an ornate version of the American Gothic of McCarthy and Faulkner. Throw in an elastic attitude to grammar and all of this has a thrillingly defamiliarizing effect: though he’s writing in English, Lynch makes you feel like you’ve magically acquired the ability to understand a foreign language.” Steve Shayler, a contributor to the Bookbag Web site, asserted: “The characters and their emotions are written brilliantly.” Shayler added of the novel: “It was bleak and depressing but quite beautifully so.” Writing on the London Guardian Online, Hugo Hamilton remarked: “Lynch has an impressive gift for storytelling.” Booklist critic Margaret Flanagan described the volume as “a stunning tale of retribution and disintegration, not recommended for the faint of heart.” “Lynch’s beautifully intertwined emotional and physical landscapes have a timelessness,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. A Kirkus Reviews contributor stated: “Lynch evokes so many shades of guilt, pride, innocence, righteousness, and punishment that the book might help found a religion.”
In Grace, Lynch tells the story of a young girl’s coming-of-age during the Great Famine that wracked Ireland in the 1840s. Fourteen-year-old Grace is exiled from her home by her own mother, who cuts Grace’s hair, dresses her as a boy, and sends her off to survive during one of the most devastating periods of Irish history. Grace is soon joined by her brother Colly, and the two try different ways to endure the winter that follows the destruction of the potato crop. “Grace is a plucky, headstrong survivor, and she survives a great deal in the course of this book, including exposure, malnutrition, muggings and attempted rape,” wrote Jon Michaud in the Washington Post. “Early on, she loses her brother in a scene so hauntingly understated that the reader shares Grace’s shock and denial.” “In comparison to the hardships experienced in the novel,” suggested Hope Racine in BookPage, “readers come to see that her mother’s choice was actually an act of love.” Grace’s maturity is hard-won and difficult, but perhaps not as difficult as staying at home would have been. “Growing into womanhood as a wanderer,” reported Booklist reviewer Margaret Flanagan, “Grace rises above cruel circumstances to control her own destiny in … surprising directions.” Lynch, asserted a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “is a writer who wrenches beauty even from the horror that makes a starving girl think her ‘blood is trickling over the rocks of my bones.'” His “powerful, inventive language,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “intensifies the poignancy of the woe that characterizes this world of have-nothings struggling to survive.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2013, Mark Levine, review of Red Sky in Morning, p. 51; April 15, 2015, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Black Snow, p. 32; June, 2017, Margaret Flanagan, review of Grace, p. 63.
BookPage, July, 2017, Hope Racine, review of Grace, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2013, review of Red Sky in Morning; March 1, 2015, review of The Black Snow; May 1, 2017, review of Grace.
Publishers Weekly, July 8, 2013, review of Red Sky in Morning, p. 63; March 9, 2015, review of The Black Snow, p. 49; May 8, 2017, review of Grace, p. 34.
Toronto Star (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 5, 2013, Emily Donaldson, review of Red Sky in Morning.
Washington Post, July 17, 2017, Jon Michaud, “A Girl’s Haunting Struggle for Survival during the Irish Potato Famine.”
ONLINE
All Things Considered Online, http://www.npr.org/ (November 4, 2013), Alan Cheuse, review of Red Sky in Morning.
Bookbag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (December 16, 2015), Steve Shayler, review of The Black Snow.
Daily Beast, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ (December 18, 2013), “How I Write: Paul Lynch.”
Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/ (March 29, 2014), Hugo Hamilton, review of The Black Snow.
Historical Novel Society, http://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (February 12, 2014), Richard Lee, author interview.
Paul Lynch Website, http://www.paullynchwriter.com (December 26, 2017), author profile.
Toronto Star Online, http://www.thestar.com/ (July 25, 2015), Emily Donaldson, review of The Black Snow.
Paul Lynch is the author of the novels Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow. He won France's Prix Libr'à Nous for Best Foreign Novel, and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter.
Paul Lynch is the prize-winning author of GRACE, THE BLACK SNOW and RED SKY IN MORNING. He won the French booksellers’ prize Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He won the Prix des Lecteurs Privat, and was nominated for France’s Prix Femina, the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize) and the Prix du Roman Fnac (Fnac Novel Prize), as well as being shortlisted at Ireland’s Bord Gais Irish Books of the Year. In the US, both his novels were Amazon.com books of the month and he was selected by Barnes and Noble for the Discover Great New Writers series.
After a six-publisher auction, his debut novel RED SKY IN MORNING was published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic in 2013. It was a finalist for France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) and was nominated for the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize). In the US, it was an Amazon.com Book of the Month and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, where Lynch was hailed as “a lapidary young master”. It was a book of the year in The Irish Times, The Toronto Star, the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post.
His second novel THE BLACK SNOW was published in 2014 in the UK and Ireland and 2015 in the US where it was an Amazon.com Book of the Month. In France it won the French booksellers’ prize Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and the inaugural Prix des Lecteurs Privat. It was nominated for the Prix Femina and the Prix du Roman Fnac (Fnac Novel Prize). It was hailed as “masterful” by The Sunday Times, “fierce and stunning” by The Toronto Star and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered where Alan Cheuse said that Lynch’s writing was found “somewhere between that of Nobel poet Seamus Heaney and Cormac McCarthy”. The American writer Ron Rash has called Lynch “one of his generation’s very finest novelists”.
In France, RED SKY IN MORNING (Un ciel rouge, le matin) and THE BLACK SNOW (La neige noire) have been published to massive critical acclaim.
Paul was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Co Donegal, and lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011, when the newspaper folded. He has written for many Irish newspapers and has written regularly for The Sunday Times on film.
Novels
RED SKY IN MORNING (2013)
» Quercus (UK, Ireland, Commonwealth) 2013
» Little, Brown — (North America) 2014
» Albin Michel (France) 2014
» 66th&2nd (Italy) 2017
Coll Coyle wakes to a blood dawn and a day he does not want to face. The young father stands to lose everything on account of the cruel intentions of his landowner’s heedless son.
Although reluctant, Coll sets out to confront his trouble. And so begins his fall from the rain-soaked, cloud-swirling Eden, and a pursuit across the wild bog lands of Donegal.
Behind him is John Faller – a man who has vowed to hunt Coll to the ends of the earth – in a pursuit that will stretch to an epic voyage across the Atlantic, and to greater tragedy in the new American frontier.
Red Sky in Morning is a dark tale of oppression bathed in sparkling, unconstrained imagery. A compassionate and sensitive exploration of the merciless side of man and the indifference of nature, it is both a mesmerizing feat of imagination and a landmark piece of fiction.
THE BLACK SNOW (2014)
» Quercus (UK, Ireland, Commonwealth) 2014
» Little, Brown (North America) 2015
» Albin Michel (France) 2015
» 66th&2nd (Italy) 2018
In the spring of 1945, farm-worker Matthew Peoples runs into a burning byre and does not come out alive. The farm’s owner, Barnabas Kane, can only look on as his friend dies and all 43 of his cattle are destroyed in the blaze.
Following the disaster, the bull-headed and proudly self-sufficient Barnabas is forced to reach out to the farming community for assistance. But resentment simmers over Matthew Peoples’ death, and Barnabas and his family begin to believe their efforts at recovery are being sabotaged.
Barnabas is determined to hold firm. Yet his son Billy struggles under the weight of a terrible secret, and his wife Eskra is suffocated by the uncertainty surrounding their future. And as Barnabas fights ever harder for what is rightfully his, his loved ones are drawn ever closer to a fate that should never have been theirs.
In The Black Snow, Paul Lynch takes the pastoral novel and – with the calmest of hands – tears it apart. With beautiful, haunting prose, Lynch illuminates what it means to be alive during crisis, and puts to the test our deepest certainties about humankind.
GRACE (2017)
» Oneworld (UK, Ireland, Commonwealth) 2017
» Little, Brown (North America) 2017
» Albin Michel (France) 2018
» 66th&2nd (Italy) 2019
Early one October morning, Grace’s mother snatches her from sleep and brutally cuts off her hair, declaring, ‘You are the strong one now.’ With winter close at hand and Ireland already suffering, Grace is no longer safe at home. And so her mother outfits her in men’s clothing and casts her out. When her younger brother Colly follows after her, the two set off on a remarkable journey in the looming shadow of their country’s darkest hour.
The broken land they pass through reveals untold suffering as well as unexpected beauty. To survive, Grace must become a boy, a bandit, a penitent and, finally, a woman – all the while afflicted by inner voices that arise out of what she has seen and what she has lost.
Told in bold and lyrical language by an author who has been called ‘one of his generation’s very finest novelists’ (Ron Rash), Grace is an epic coming-of-age novel and a poetic evocation of the Irish famine as it has never been written.
Paul Lynch (writer)
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Paul Lynch is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed Irish writer living in Dublin, Ireland. He was born in Limerick in 1977 and grew up in Co. Donegal, Ireland.[1] His first novel, Red Sky in Morning, won him acclaim in the United States and France, where the book was a finalist for France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book Award)[2]. His second novel, The Black Snow, won France's bookseller prize, Prix Libr’à Nous for best foreign novel.[3] His novels have also been nominated for France’s Prix Femina, the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize) and the Prix du Roman Fnac (Fnac Novel Prize)[4]., as well as being shortlisted for Best Newcomer at Ireland’s Bord Gais Irish Books of the Year.[5] Both Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow were Amazon.com Books of the Month selections, while his debut novel was selected by Barnes and Noble pick for Discover Great New Writers series.[6] The American novelist Ron Rash has called Lynch, "one of his generation's very finest novelists".[7]
Contents [hide]
1
Background
2
Awards
3
Novels
4
Reviews
4.1
Red Sky in Morning
4.2
The Black Snow
4.3
Grace
5
References
6
External links
Background[edit]
Paul Lynch was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011, when the newspaper ceased operations. He had previously served from 2004 as the paper's deputy chief-sub editor. He has written regularly for The Sunday Times on film and has also written for The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post, The Irish Daily Mail and Film Ireland.
He appeared regularly as a film critic on Irish radio. In 2011, The Irish Times called him one of Ireland's "finest film writers".[8]
In a 2013 Irish Times profile, Lynch cites his primary literary influences as Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov and John Banville.[9]
Awards[edit]
Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel, winner 2016
Prix des Lecteurs Privat, winner 2016
Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, finalist 2014
Prix Femina, nominated 2015
Prix du Premier Roman, nominated 2014
Prix du Roman Fnac, nominated 2015
Best Newcomer at Ireland’s Bord Gais Irish Books of the Year, finalist 2013
Novels[edit]
Red Sky in Morning. London: Quercus, 2013. New York: Little, Brown, 2013
The Black Snow. London: Quercus, 2014. New York: Little, Brown, 2015
Grace. London: Oneworld, 2017. New York: Little, Brown, 2017
Reviews[edit]
Red Sky in Morning[edit]
NPR: From the opening lines of the novel - night sky was black and there was blood, morning crack of light on the edge of the earth - you find yourself in the hands of a lapidary young master[10]
Toronto Star: The gnarled beauty of Lynch’s poetic prose makes this novel a singular achievement.[11]
Guardian: Sumptuous and poetic.... Lynch's sense of the period, and the huge disruptions in society which affected every single character, is clever and well informed, but he has taken a real and fascinating risk with the style.[12]
Irish Times: An intriguing debut novel reflects its author's past as a film critic, as well as showing off his love of language.
Washington Post: Red Sky in Morning is queasy reading at first, and readers unfamiliar with this loquacious strain of Irish fiction may not stick around long enough to experience the rich intoxication it eventually produces. They should, though, because a debut as passionate as this one is a transporting experience.[13]
Publishers Weekly: This rewarding debut has the feel of a classic American western…. Lynch’s prose is sharply observed, and his themes are elemental and powerful: the violence of existence, the illusion of choice in a fatalistic universe.[14]
The Black Snow[edit]
NPR: As Lynch presents the story, it becomes an out-of-the-ordinary creation, a novel in which sentence after sentence come so beautifully alive in all of the fullness of its diction and meaning that it makes most other contemporary Irish fiction seem dull by comparison.[15]
Toronto Star: The Black Snow is, like its predecessor, Red Sky in Morning, a fierce and stunning novel written in chiaroscuro; its darkness always threatening to absorb its light. The Irish author’s gnarled, lustrous prose style is peppered with local vernacular; his literary sensibility an ornate version of the American Gothic of McCarthy and Faulkner. Throw in an elastic attitude to grammar and all of this has a thrillingly defamiliarizing effect: though he’s writing in English, Lynch makes you feel like you’ve magically acquired the ability to understand a foreign language.[16]
The Sunday Times, Ireland: Lynch is masterful. Layer by layer he teases out character and context, alternating action and reflection... The triumph of this book is the uncanny uses to which Lynch puts language. Prose is more often concerned to reassure us that the world is manageable and intelligible than it is to face up to the cold truth that life beyond our immediate hearth is largely mysterious and beyond our powers of comprehension. Prose writers who can ground us in what we know while opening our minds to the vast unknown are few. In our time the name that springs most readily to mind is Cormac McCarthy… we can add Paul Lynch to a short list.[17]
The Irish Times: A classic tragic hero ... The striking talent of its author is his brilliant ability to reinvent the English language ... There is a magic to this kind of writing[18]
The Guardian: raw, savage ... and tender. A brutal welcome awaits when an Irish emigrant returns from 1940s New York.
Grace[edit]
The New York Times Book Review: The Irish writer’s third novel raises timeless questions about suffering and survival through the story of two children expelled from their impoverished home in the midst of the Great Famine. When you’re starving, Lynch seems to be asking, are you truly alive?[19]
The Washington Post: Grace is a moving work of lyrical and at times hallucinatory beauty… that reads like a hybrid of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.[20]
The Boston Globe: Passionately lyrical… Grace’’ belongs to several great traditions — the picaresque novel, the coming-of-age novel, and the orphan novel… [this] is a relentless novel, but Lynch allows his heroine a true complexity of feeling — about her brother, her mother, Bart, and what she sees happening around her — that allows the reader to empathize even as we wring our hands. Grace’’ is not only a gripping tale about an appalling period in history — although that would be quite enough — but also, sadly, piercingly relevant.[21]
The Sunday Times, Ireland: Grace... pushes the Famine novel into territory even richer and stranger still. As a writer, Lynch is sui generis. His style is bold, grandiose, mesmeric. He strives for large effects, wrestles with big ideas. In Melville’s formulation, he is one of those writers who dares “to dive” into the darkest recesses of the soul, risking all to surface clutching the pearl.[22]
The Daily Mail: It’s not just style that makes this an unforgettable book... What ensues is full of incident and grotesques, fizzing with adventure, a counter to the enervating effects of their starvation. But gradually it becomes a darker book as hunger eats away at humanity — and the darker it gets, the more [Lynch’s] unerring gifts are confirmed[23]
Grace
Hope Racine
(July 2017): p21+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
By Paul Lynch
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Little, Brown $26, 368 pages
ISBN 9780316316309 eBook available
HISTORICAL FICTION
Paul Lynch's new novel, Grace, opens with a jarring scene: Fourteen-year-old Grace is pulled out of her house one morning in 1845 and dragged to the killing stump by her pregnant mother, who then cuts off her daughter's hair. Grace is dressed in men's clothing and cast from the house as her mother declares, "You are the strong one now." What ensues is a heartbreaking tale of desolation, hunger, loneliness and survival, set during the darkest hour in Irish history.
Lynch, who has garnered comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and Colm Toibin for his previous works Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow, has woven a sweeping novel that is difficult to properly categorize. While calling upon traditional Irish storytelling, Grace also feels vaguely Dickensian and unfolds through language that's more like poetry than prose. Even through gruesome parts of the novel--such as the death of Grace's younger brother or the mildly traumatic experience of her first menstruation--Lynch's descriptions and turns of phrase are macabrely beautiful.
Readers follow Grace as she wanders the barren countryside, reinventing herself. She is a boy, a man, a cattle herd and even a thief. She speaks with ghosts and struggles to survive. Many would see her mother's choice to cast her out as harsh, but in comparison to the hardships experienced in the novel, readers come to see that her mother's choice was actually an act of love, an attempt to help Grace grow and save her from hunger, pain and potentially the hands of her mother's new lover, Boggs.
Grace offers an intriguing perspective on the concepts of femininity and hardship, one that feels as though it has already claimed its place among great Irish literature.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Racine, Hope. "Grace." BookPage, July 2017, p. 21+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497099076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4578bbb6. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497099076
Grace
Margaret Flanagan
113.19-20 (June 2017): p63+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Grace. By Paul Lynch. July 2017.368p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316316309); e-book, $13.99 (9780316316293).
In celebrated Irish novelist Lynch's (The Black Snow, 2015) latest tale, Grace is harshly thrust out into the world by her mother, who can think of no other way to protect her blossoming 14-year-old. Now, Grace must rapidly learn both physical and mental survival skills to endure in nineteenth-century, famine-plagued Ireland. Joined by her younger brother, Colly, she adopts varying personas to suit the requirements of the times and places she visits. Grace initially disguises herself as a boy to travel more safely, and she scavenges, hustles, and steals to make it from one day to the next in a world grown weary of want and need. As her hardscrabble odyssey continues, she begins to develop in unexpected ways, her eyes opening to both ruthless reality and limitless possibilities. Growing into womanhood as a wanderer, Grace rises above cruel circumstances to control her own destiny in remarkably surprising directions, casting new light on this grim and pivotal era in Irish history. --Margaret Flanagan
YA: The ordeals and adventures of Lynch's resilient young characters in famine-stricken Ireland will fascinate YA readers of literary fiction and those interested in history. MF.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Grace." Booklist, June 2017, p. 63+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582748/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=485f44cb. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582748
Grace
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Grace
Paul Lynch. Little, Brown, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-0-316-31630-9
Lynch's (Red Sky in Morning) wonderful third novel follows a teenage girl through impoverished Ireland at the height of the Great Famine. Grace Coyle is 14 in 1844, when her mother dresses her as a boy and sends her off to find work to save herself and her destitute family. Grace travels with her 12-year-old brother, Colly, south from Urris Hills. Before they reach Donegal, Colly dies, but his ghost continues to accompany Grace, alerting her to dangers that prove far more plentiful than food or employment. Mistaken for a hireling named Tim, Grace finds work on a cattle drive and a road-building project. She then ends up an itinerant drifter alongside one-armed John Bart. What John and Grace cannot earn, they steal; the ghost of a woman killed during a botched robbery also becomes Grace's traveling companion. Grace eventually makes her way to Limerick before heading home, persisting even when she loses the ability to speak. In Gaelic-lilted poetic prose, Lynch evokes nearly five years of misery: the Samhain (end-of-harvest festival) after flooding destroys the harvest, wintry deprivation, endless days on nameless roads, starvation, and desperation. Heart-wrenching images include Grace's pregnant mother dragging Grace to the killing stump to chop off her hair, Grace eating stolen seed potatoes, and much worse. Lynch's powerful, inventive language intensifies the poignancy of the woe that characterizes this world of have-nothings struggling to survive. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Grace." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0b9934c3. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949052
Lynch, Paul: GRACE
(May 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Lynch, Paul GRACE Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 11 ISBN: 978-0-316-31630-9
A gifted Irish author offers another take on his country's Great Famine through the eyes of a teenage girl as she travels through a land wracked by want.When a blight hits the potato harvest of 1845, a pregnant widow with four children seeks to spare her 14-year-old daughter, Grace, from hunger, maybe, but certainly from the appetites of her own insatiable lover. She cuts the girl's hair, dresses her as a boy, and sends her off to seek work. Grace is soon joined by her irrepressible brother Colly, 12, who gives her a few lessons in maleness. Their time together is cut short when he is swept away in a teeming river as they try to salvage a drowned sheep. She lucks into work helping to herd cows, but betrayal and murder await down the drovers' path. She joins a road crew, but her first period surprises and unmasks her, stirring unwanted interest. A fellow worker saves her from would-be rapists and travels with her on adventures that seem to cover about half of Ireland by foot. Their unmeasurable route is through deepening despair and the hell beyond mere hunger--"past want to a point that is longing narrowed down to the forgetting of all else"--and the descent into crime and then a blackness: indeed, four Sterne-like blank black pages to signify perhaps more than pen can write, even one as eloquent as Lynch's (The Black Snow, 2015, etc.). Grace walks under "a sky of old cloth and the sun stained upon it." Elsewhere, "the air is stitched with insects." And sometimes Lynch seems to move beyond normal language: "A soul being loosened from a whin is shaped like a shout" (whin is gorse and the context is dead souls at dusk). This is a writer who wrenches beauty even from the horror that makes a starving girl think her "blood is trickling over the rocks of my bones."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lynch, Paul: GRACE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002969/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=95b61ae3. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002969
A girl's haunting struggle for survival during the Irish Potato Famine
Jon Michaud
(July 17, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Byline: Jon Michaud
Paul Lynch's new novel, "Grace," takes place during the first year of the Great Hunger, more commonly known in the United States as the Irish Potato Famine. During that cataclysmic event in the middle of the 19th century, the Emerald Isle lost almost a quarter of its population to starvation, disease and emigration. Though grim in subject, "Grace" is a moving work of lyrical and at times hallucinatory beauty.
At the novel's outset, the title character, age 14, is banished by her mother, who is pregnant with her fifth child. "The harvest is destroyed," Grace is told. "You must find work and work like a man." Her wisecracking younger brother Colly runs away from home and joins Grace on a trek across the rural west of Ireland, from Donegal to Limerick. The result is a bleak picaresque that reads like a hybrid of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."
Grace is a plucky, headstrong survivor, and she survives a great deal in the course of this book, including exposure, malnutrition, muggings and attempted rape. Early on, she loses her brother in a scene so hauntingly understated that the reader shares Grace's shock and denial. But Colly comes back as a near-constant voice in Grace's head, badgering her, telling filthy jokes and keeping her, as much as possible, out of danger.
In less capable hands, this device might have become tiresome, but it is of a piece with the ghostly quality of Lynch's novel. Wrecked by hunger and disease, Ireland has become a land of zombies. "Men now walk the roads following the devil's footsteps," Grace observes. For much of the book, Grace and Colly engage in a discussion about the nature of the soul and the afterlife.
During her year-long journey, Grace works as a cowhand, domestic servant, con artist and thief. She discovers love and experiments with religious faith. Lynch does not devote much of his narrative to the political and economic causes of the Great Hunger (don't look for a history lesson here), but there is an undercurrent of populist ire that resonates with our own turbulent times. A violent burglar who gets to know Grace justifies his actions to her in this way: "Don't you see what is going on around you? The have-it-alls and well-to-doers who don't give a f--- what is happening to the ordinary people. . . . This is the way of things now. It could be the end of the world for the likes of us, but to the likes of them, they aren't bothered."
Unlike the have-it-alls and the well-to-doers, the readers of this novel will care a great deal about the fates of Grace and her fellow travelers.
Jon Michaud is a novelist and the head librarian at the Center for Fiction.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Michaud, Jon. "A girl's haunting struggle for survival during the Irish Potato Famine." Washingtonpost.com, 17 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500123421/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=98549362. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500123421