This collection of linked stories has the heft of a novel, with linked stories in the sense that what happens in one story is reflected in a later story and timeframe. The New England setting is evocative; you feel immediately enmeshed in this world and feel its power. Shattuck has a disarming way of drawing you in immediately and keeping you turning pages, yet there’s nothing obvious or overly dramatic about his plots or his characters. Writers will want to reread this over and over to try and get how he pulls off his magic. The language is spare and subtly easy to read, with descriptions of nature that leap from the page. The book as a whole is imbued with an aura of history, memory, regret…something that makes them stick and linger in the mind, tapping one’s emotional core. I found THE HISTORY OF SOUND to be haunting, enigmatic, unique, brilliant, and beautiful.
Now a major movie starring Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor
'Triumphant' The Times
'Stellar' Daily Mail
'Exceptionally accomplished' The Scotsman
'Sublime' Observer
'Exquisite' Sunday Post
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.
Set in the Irish village of Faha in County Clare, Noe is a 78-year-old man looking back to the spring of 1958, a summer when, miraculously, it never rains and when “the electricity” is about to come to this rural backwater. Noe has dropped out of the seminary after his mother’s death, reeling from grief, and gone to live with his grandparents in Faha, where he spent time as a child.
As if to emphasize how slowly time moves in a “forgotten elsewhere,” Wlliams never rushes his plot or his prose. Faha comes alive in his hands with lovingly detailed descriptions of both the place and the social and cultural intricacies.
Despite the slow pace, the plot is a strong one. A stranger, Christy, comes to town, boarding with Noe’s grandparents and befriends him. Christy is ostensibly in town to work on the electrification project but is really there to right a romantic wrong, a situation that keeps you guessing until the very end. There’s also is the tender awakening of Noe’s romantic desires.
Williams plumbs the depths of single moments, somehow conveying the very quality of existence. The book is also very funny , moving, and uplifting.
Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards
Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it…
The novel is set on an island between Australia and Antarctica, loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site and research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. McConaghy sets up the novel as a thriller, and the story is an intriguing one: For years, widower Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in this natural paradise. But due to climate change, sea level rise is happening so fast the island will soon disappear. A boat is going to be picking the family up in seven weeks, the timeline of the novel, and the family is packing up what they can of the precious seeds that have been kept in a vault in case the world’s food supply needs to be regrown after environmental catastrophe. All the researchers have left, and the family is alone on the island. Into this tense situation a woman, Rowan, washes up on shore, just when Dom discovers the island’s communications equipment has been sabotaged, cutting them off entirely from the outside world. McConaghy slides between all five characters’ points of view, alluding to but not explaining various mysteries that pile up and keep the suspense high. I found some of the plot aspects strained plausibility, but what’s undeniable, and makes the book a must read, is how McConaghy’s plunges you into this evocative setting and her truly endearing characters, most especially the youngest boy, Orly. McConaghy writes as hauntingly of their emotional and inner lives as she does the captivating penguins, birds, and seals they live among. Thematically the book is equally rich, weighing questions like, if the world is coming to an end, do you embrace love? What do you save, the practical or the beautiful? Besides an elegy for nature, Wild Dark Shore is about families, and parenting, and choosing hope despite grief and loss. This is a gorgeous, heart-pumping, heart-wrenching and mesmerizing read.
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.
Dominic
Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island
not far from Antarctica. Home to the world's largest seed bank,
Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the
Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they
are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty, isolation has
taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first
heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen,
has…
The Stark Beauty of Last Things is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk's last parcel of undeveloped land.
Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who are struggling to hold onto their property against pressure to sell. When a forest fire breaks out, Clancy comes under suspicion for arson, complicating his efforts to navigate competing agendas for the best uses of the land and to find the healing and home he has always longed for.
Told from multiple points of view, The Stark Beauty of Last Things explores our connection to nature—and what we stand to lose when that connection is severed.
