I was lucky. I knew something was wrong and was able to do something about it before I had a heart attack. When I was out for a run my heart rate would hit a ceiling and I had the peculiar sensation of something constricting my fuel line (this turned out to be a pretty accurate description of my dangerously narrowed cardiac arteries reaching full capacity). My GP and I ruled out several other possibilities, I went for a scan and was whisked into hospital. Because I hadn’t had a heart attack, my physical recovery was relatively swift. I was walking round the ward a couple of days after the procedure and doing gentle runs and cycle rides after a few months. But my brain was porridge. I couldn’t write or read. I woke up every day feeling as if I’d just downed a large glass of red wine or thrown back 4mg of Valium, and not in a pleasurable way. Sometimes it was infuriating, sometimes I was too tired to feel anything.
Haig’s wise and moving novel is both a mystery and a love story, a fantasy and a billet-doux to the planet. Perhaps its greatest gift lies in showing us that it is possible to dismantle the boundaries we have built, grasp the connections previously hidden, and appreciate life in all its richness. And the realisation that magic realism probably isn’t an oxymoron after all.
What Elif Shafak excels at, though, is making us understand that, despite the many ways humanity divides itself, we are all connected – by nature and also by the stories we pass from generation to generation. If we learned the lessons of history, respected and listened to the nature that sustains us, the world we live in would be a better place. Through all of her writing – and certainly in this remarkable novel – she effaces dualities, dissolves hierarchies and transcends boundaries. There Are Rivers in the Sky is a difficult book to categorise. It will make you think, cry, rage – and hope. It is Elif Shafak at her best.
Like Berry’s fierce essays and luminous novels, these poems offer gifts of vision, of knowing that there is another way to live now on this Earth: a way that honors love, the land, and all beings. Can any of us rest while there's still a chance to bring that about?
In Eddie Winston is Looking For Love, Marianne Cronin does a terrific job of balancing the divergent tones – the romance and tragedy of Bridie and Eddie’s near-miss love story, and the comedy of Eddie and Bella’s hijinks – to create a novel that feels abundant and intimate, messy and tragic, frustrating and joyful. Just like life.
With equal parts research and reflection, these essays transpose landscapes of personal and shared loss to show how absence can be an opportunity for connection—both to a place and to the people who define and witness it.