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The River Capture
Mary Costello
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for The River Capture
hardcover.
A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE IRISH TIMES and IRISH INDEPENDENT
Shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards
Shortlisted for Novel of the Year, Dalkey Literary Awards
Shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award
Luke O'Brien has left Dublin to live a quiet life on his family land on the bend of the River Sullane. Alone in his big house, he longs for a return to his family's heyday and turns to books for solace.
One morning a young woman arrives at his door and enters his life ... Read morewith profound consequences. Her presence presents him and his family with an almost impossible dilemma.
In a novel that pays glorious homage to Joyce, The River Capture tells of one man's descent into near madness, and the possibility of rescue. This is a novel about love, loyalty and the raging forces of nature. More than anything, it is a book about the life of the mind and the redemptive powers of art.
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Product Details
Publisher
Canongate Books
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Mary Costello
Mary Costello lives in Galway. Her short story collection, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Novel of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards and was named overall Irish Book of the Year. It was serialised on ... Read moreBBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize, the EU Prize for Literature and the Prix Littéraire des Ambassadeurs de la Francophonie en Irlande, and has been translated into several languages. The River Capture is her second novel. Show Less
Reviews for The River Capture
One of the most surprising and original novels of 2019 . . . Exceptional . . . This is a sensory book that draws on the body to feed the mind
The Times
Elegantly written . . . Exquisite and impressionistic prose
Observer
A self-confessed homage to James ... Read moreJoyce . . . Costello writes insightfully
Sunday Times
Luminous . . . Unexpected . . . An audacious act of literary ventriloquism and one that Costello pulls off astonishingly successfully . . . Joyce devotees will discover much to enjoy in this clever homage, while fans of contemporary Irish literature will find a subtle, slightly melancholy, engrossing read
Melissa Harrison
Guardian
The River Capture is breathtaking. It is profound in the most bruising way; elegant, and then thrillingly savage; expansive, but masterfully precise, and full of sentences that made me choke on jealous rage. Costello is in a different class altogether
LISA McINERNEY Astonishingly bittersweet and beautiful, The River Capture is a quiet, important, hypnotic book about absolutely everything. It is as near perfect as it is possible for a novel to be
SARA BAUME A hypnotic read revealing how the ebb and flow of memory, family loyalty and love can disrupt the current of a life
Mail on Sunday
Powerful . . . The River Capture reminds us that everything is connected, that we are, as humans, not separate from the teeming world of nature around us . . . Lyrical
Financial Times
A virtuoso performance in catching the whole texture of a life
Sunday Times
Intense, engrossing, a novel that constantly subverts the reader's expectation - Mary Costello is a truly startling talent
KEVIN BARRY The most beautiful new novel I read this year. A love letter to Joyce and Ulysses
John Self
Irish Times, Books of the Year
Costello's writing is truly beautiful and this book will hypnotise you from the first page to the last
Stylist
Profound, elegant, laced with lyricism . . . With all its intertextual richness, The River Capture is a fertile addition to the literary ecosystem
Times Literary Supplement
Mary Costello's audacious second novel, the successor to the Costa-shortlisted Academy Street, confirms her as one to watch . . . A homage to Joyce . . . Costello's characters have a persuasive, urgent life that leaves a lasting impression
Daily Mail
Adventurous in its ambitions . . . Beautifully crafted
Guardian
Bold, audacious, and beautiful
TRACEY THORN
New Statesman
A Joycean love story awash with the past . . . Atmospheric. The mesmeric prose, like the river rendered is "something alive and benevolent"
Irish Times
One of the most intriguing works by an Irish writer since Mike McCormack's Solar Bones . . . Full of tenderness, beauty and some deeply affecting human introspection
Sunday Independent
Costello plays with the borders of psychological realism in this ruminative, dream-like novel, which sweeps up ideas about animal rights, the legacy of trauma, the fluidity of sexual experience and the purpose of art itself within the fragmenting, restlessly questioning perceptions of one man's gradual breakdown
Metro
A writer of extraordinary vision . . . Deeply absorbing
Irish Independent, Books of the Year
Deft and elegant, earthy and immersing, The River Capture is a searingly close portrait of a protagonist unravelling. The legacy of Joyce, family secrets, duty and desire, hope and loneliness are the strands that wind through Luke's story. The result is utterly compelling
JESS KIDD A novel of glorious abundance: reverent and angry and earthy and spiritual. Costello takes the familiar and transforms it, again and again, into soaring meditations on love, sensuality, human cruelty. To read The River Capture is to witness a writer in evolution, taking her work to a whole new level. This is a bold, sophisticated, beautiful novel, both a homage to Joyce and a deeply personal and contemporary work
MOLLY McCLOSKEY This ambitious new Irish novel sets out to follow in some daunting literary footsteps, and rewards the effort required to read it
Irish Independent
Sublime
Skinny
This is an extremely fine novel, one that needs to be read slowly so as to appreciate the small jewels of detail and not be overwhelmed by the stresses of another's mind so fully depicted . . . A brilliant as well as eye opening read
NB Magazine
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