Review: The Heart Goes Last

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As ever, set in her speculative fiction headspace, The Heart Goes Last is a love story of sorts that takes in post-consumerist/post-recession meltdown, law and order, and the consequences of unfettered private sector meddling in the public sector. All the normal ingredients for Atwood. At times scary and at others blackly amusing, The Heart Goes Last hits all the right marks.

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Review: A History of Loneliness

A History of Loneliness by John Boyne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An at times painfully difficult novel to read. Not because of the quality of the writing, far from it, rather because of the ever-growing realisation the main character Father Odran Yates, so long a passive bystander in all aspects of his life, is doomed to do nothing, to say nothing about the horrific events that unfold around him.

On one hand he may well be a symbol of the Catholic Church in Ireland, at least the version of the church that the hierarchy would want you to believe. However, like the church, his inability to recognise or countenance the truth of what was happening in front of his eyes is just as damning as the church's moving paedophile priests from parish to parish.

It's hard not to be moved, and at times moved to anger, by the novel. A must read.


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