Irish Book Box Subscription
I’m delighted to partner with Bookshop West Portal and curate their first-ever national book subscription service. I’ll choose six new Irish books of fiction or nonfiction over 12 rolling months and write a letter to go with each title, sharing why I picked it and how I hope the read will also captivate subscribers.
Feel free to let me know about forthcoming titles by Irish and Irish diaspora writers, especially underrepresented voices (LGBTQ+, women, refugees, immigrants, working class, Pavee, writers of color, writers with disabilities/chronic illness). In addition to my picks, my letter and Bookshop West Portal’s website will include recommendations for those titles that make my subscription shortlist.
Already on my radar are forthcoming books from Bono, Emma Donoghue, Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan, Louise Kennedy, Michelle Gallen, Sarah Gilmartin, Karl Geary, Sebastian Barry, and Robert Harris. Who am I missing?
I’d love you to join me on this reading journey. For more information and to subscribe, go here: https://www.bookshopwestportal.com/ir....
newest »
Thanks for reaching out, James, and congratulations on LETTERS TO JUDE. I'm afraid only forthcoming titles published in the US can be considered for the book box, but I look forward to seeking out your novel for my own reading pleasure.Warm wishes,
Ethel.
Congrats on your curating role.
You may be interested to know that my new novel Letters to Jude was published 29 June 2022 by Balestier Press and it would be great if you could consider mentioning it.
Letters to Jude is also available in some good bookshops and online with a Look Inside facility showing the author’s Preface
I was privileged to receive an arts grant towards the completion of this novel.
Unable to find emotional rapport with his wife, Lil, with whom he shares a childless marriage, middle-aged and ailing librarian Leo Lambkin begins a correspondence with an old flame, Bernarda, who writes to him from Seville after she hears of the tragic death of his mother. Bernarda, whom Leo disguises as Jude, informs him that he is the father of her child, Uanito, begot some years previously by violent circumstances. As dark wintry days give way to the increasing light and hope of summer, Leo and Jude long for an anticipated rendezvous. But what are the forces that stand in their way?
'If every word was once a poem, then what happened? We think that we are using language while, like the ground beneath us, all the time language may be using us. In Letters to Jude James Lawless takes us on a magical tour also a through the levels of language, in all its glory and its slipperiness. He has at once a heightened sense of the promises of language and a deep, nagging doubt about the limits to communicability. Such is his intrepid sophistication, that he can even bring himself to doubt the very medium through which those doubts are expressed. A tour-de-force for the mind but also a chastening that words come from the body and return to it'. Declan Kiberd
‘A rich Joycean novel with beautifully written passages of linguistic diversity and deep emotions full of insights.’ Brandon Yen
There is a great review of Letters to Jude in the Sunday Independent 28/8/2022
Kind regards,
James Lawless