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A novel often carries meanings that sit beneath its visible events. A name may carry a history, a repeated object may quietly alter the emotional temperature…

Seamus Heaney’s Ireland is made from particular ground: the dark fields of County Derry, the boglands holding their ancient secrets, the farmyards marked by…

A literary excerpt is a small doorway into a much larger work. It gives readers a taste of a novelist’s voice, a memoirist’s way of seeing, or a storyteller’s…

I write about race because race enters a person’s life long before it appears in a speech, a policy document or an election campaign. It can shape where a…

Some places seem to arrive with their own plot. A road bends towards a harbour, a church bell marks the afternoon, and a row of painted cottages hints at…

The bookshelf in my father's study was not arranged alphabetically, nor was it organised by genre. It was a vertical archaeology of his reading life, with…

For anyone who puts words on a page and hopes they matter, the writers of the American civil rights era remain a source of instruction that has not been fully…

Howard G. Franklin's An Irish Experience sits at a curious crossroads in contemporary life writing. The book begins as a journey through Ireland, with all the…

Howard G. Franklin spent decades listening to stories that others had tried to silence. The narrative that became his most ambitious novel was not conjured in…