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Books

March 2023

Busting half-baked myths: Peter Wharmby’s book is persuasive and firm without being hectoring Busting half-baked myths: Peter Wharmby’s book is persuasive and firm without being hectoring Gallery

Untypical by Pete Wharmby review: What it means to be autistic in a hostile world

Despite book sales seeing a resurgence thanks to BookTok — TikTok’s book content — books by autistic authors are often overlooked. Pete Wharmby might argue that very many thousands of books are probably written by autistic people given that the “world population of autistic people could be as big as 230 million”. It’s likely that you know a lot more autistic people than you think and therefore many autistic writers.

Evocative and elegiac: Karl Geary. Photo by Aleksandra Modrzejewska Evocative and elegiac: Karl Geary. Photo by Aleksandra Modrzejewska Gallery

Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary review: A sensitive portrait of friends fighting the tide in 1980s Dublin

Karl Geary has lived several lives, each one more intriguing than the last. Growing up the youngest of eight children in a working-class part of Blackrock in Dublin, Geary began his professional life working in a wallpaper shop in Talbot Street, aged 15. From there, he tried his luck in New York and the payoff was handsome. Another Irish emigrant, Shane Doyle, asked him to help out with the running of a run-down bar called Sin-é, which soon became storied in its own right. He co-founded his own fabled New York bar, The Scratcher. Geary soon heeded the siren song of acting and later, book writing. His scriptwriting credits include Coney Island Baby and the screen adaptation of Dorothy Parker’s You Were Perfectly Fine. After a five-publisher scrum, Geary signed a deal with Harvill Secker, finding himself in the same rarefied company as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami and JM Coetzee.

The Shelbourne Hotel at St Stephen’s Green, Dublin in the 1880s. Photo by Sean Sexton/Getty Images The Shelbourne Hotel at St Stephen’s Green, Dublin in the 1880s. Photo by Sean Sexton/Getty Images Gallery

The Shelbourne: where the present and the ghosts of Dublin past mingle

“Dublin’s grandness, as a capital city, is anti-romantic”, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen once observed. “Her interest lies in her contrasts, in the expression she gives to successive different ideas of living.” In particular, Bowen never lost the sense that there were particular places in the city where past and present intermingled. Reviewing Stephen Gwynn’s entertaining social history, Dublin: Old and New, in 1936, she cautioned that “Dublin is so much more than purely spectacular; she is impregnated with a past that never evaporates.”

Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Saving is a riveting read Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Saving is a riveting read

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A high school drama casts long shadows in Peter Swanson’s taut new psychological thriller

The Kind Worth Saving, the tenth psychological thriller from US author Peter Swanson, opens with a woman called Joan Whalen entering the office of her former school teacher Henry Kimball, now a private investigator, and asking him to find out whether or not her husband is having an affair. Kimball, who hasn’t seen Joan since he taught her English over 15 years ago, is a bit unsettled as she reminds him of a particularly traumatic period in his life.

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