: Christine Dwyer Hickey
: The Narrow Land WINNER of the Walter Scott Historical Prize for Fiction 2020
: Atlantic Books
: 9781786496737
: 1
: CHF 8.90
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 384
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
WINNER OF THE WALTER SCOTT HISTORICAL PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2020 WINNER OF THE DALKEY LITERARY AWARD FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR, 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS, 2019 An Irish Independent and Irish Times Book of the Year, 2019 From the author of Tatty, the Dublin: One City One Book 2020 choice ________________________ 'It is a long time since I have read such a fine novel or one that I have enjoyed quite so much.' Irish Times 1950: late summer season on Cape Cod. Michael, a ten-year-old boy, is spending the summer with Richie and his glamorous but troubled mother. Left to their own devices, the boys meet a couple living nearby - the artists Jo and Edward Hopper - and an unlikely friendship is forged. She, volatile, passionate and often irrational, suffers bouts of obsessive sexual jealousy. He, withdrawn and unwell, depressed by his inability to work, becomes besotted by Richie's frail and beautiful Aunt Katherine who has not long to live - an infatuation he shares with young Michael. A novel of loneliness and regret, the legacy of World War II and the ever-changing concept of the American Dream. 'A brilliant portrait... With a beguiling grace and a deceptive simplicity, Christine Dwyer Hickey reminds us that the past is never far away - rather, it constantly surrounds us, suspends us, haunts us.' Colum McCann

Christine Dwyer Hickey is an award winning novelist and short story writer. Her novel The Cold Eye of Heavenwon the Irish Novel of the Year of the Year 2012, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2011 and nominated for the IMPAC 2013 award. Last Train from Liguria was shortlisted for the Prix L'Européen de Littérature andTatty was chosen as one of the 50 Irish Books of the Decade as well as being nominated for The Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards novel of the year 2004. Her first novel The Dancer was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year. She has won several short story awards and her first collection The House on Parkgate Street and other Dublin stories was published in 2013. Her first play, Snow Angels premiered at the Project Theatre Dublin in 2014 and the text of same is published in March 2015 (New Island Books). The Lives of Women is her seventh novel. She is a member of Aosdana.

The Bringer of War


1


AT THE TOP of the terminal steps the boy stops short and the woman pulling him along pulls harder. The boy resists, this time bending at the knee and pressing his weight down into his heels. The woman waits a second and then spins around.

‘What? What is it now? Whatnow?’

As she turns, her basket swipes the side of the boy’s bare leg. A long red scratch springs out on his skin. The leg flinches, but the boy doesn’t make a sound. He looks at the leg, he looks at the basket then he looks at her. He leans to the side and allows his suitcase to slip out of his hand.

‘I’m not going…’ he begins.

‘You’re notgoing? What do you mean you’re not going?’

‘I don’t like—’

‘You don’tlike? What, now, don’t you like?’

This is not the first time they’ve stood in this place having this argument. The last time was two summers ago, the summer of 1948, when she’d turned her back on him to go buy the tickets and he bolted, leaving the shiny brown suitcase Harry had bought him sitting there in the middle of Grand Central. He didn’t get very far then. He hadn’t got the sense to try for an exit and was still too scared of elevators and escalators and anything, in fact, that moved him towards something he didn’t already know or couldn’t already see. And so he just plunged into the crowd and began scooting from side to side. It took no time at all between her reporting the matter and the cop dragging him back to where she’d been waiting, under the clock with four faces.

‘You the mother?’ the cop had asked.

And she’d nodded yes, because she just couldn’t bring herself to go into the whole sorry story, and to have to do it too against a blubber of tears.

She had shown her temper back then, smacking the boy on the side of his head – the first and only time she had ever done that. And then shredding the tickets in her hands and flinging the lot in his face, she had yelled, ‘Happy now?Happy?’ with the cop still standing there listening to her. ‘Is that what you want? I take a whole day off work just to go with you on a train to Boston. A whole day, just to come all the way back on my own, and this is how you treat me. Well, you can go boil for the rest of the summer in the apartment, go boil like a piece of meat in a pot – you hear me now? You can just go…’

The boy didn’t budge. He never even raised his hand to comfort his slapped ear. A slight sulk on his face was all: no shame, no regret, nothing to show any real upset. Just stood there, peering straight through her, like he was trying to figure out what colour wallpaper was inside her head.

And here they are again, two years gone by and the boy now ten years old, so far as anybody knows. The case Harry bought him is back on duty, a little more faded and a lot more scuffed after two years of getting dragged in and out from under his bed, where it had been acting as a secret container for his comic books and bits of paper and God knows what other peculiarities he kept hidden in there.

This time, she is taking no chances. The ticket was bought during yesterday’s lunchbreak and a porter Harry knows on the New Haven line has promised to keep lookout in case the boy gets any ideas about jumping off at the next station. It has all been arranged. She will put him on the train, take note of the car number and, when she sees the train pull out of the station, go call Harry in work