April's Read: Cootehill Reading Group

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

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One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

April's Read: Bailieborough Reading Group

Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall

When an innocent trip to see the play Peter Pan gives Kitty's four brothers an excuse to deny her access to her much-loved nieces, she finds herself in a skewed, vividly colored world where children become emblems of hope, longing, and grief. Still reeling from the loss of her own child that never was, Kitty is suddenly made shockingly aware of the real reason for her pervasive sense of non-existence. Suddenly, her family's oddness, the secrets of her mother’s life and death, and the disappearance of her sister come into a startling new focus—one that leaves Kitty struggling to find own identity.

April's Read - Cavan Library Reading Group

Astray by Emma Donoghue

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The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times. 

"The Hunt" was short-listed for the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.