Book of the Week from Woodbine
Into The Water (Paula Hawkins)
The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train returns with Into the Water, her addictive new novel of psychological suspense.
“Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors — think Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott — who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease … there’s a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light.” (Vogue)
A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.
Left behind is a lonely 15-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from — a place to which she vowed she’d never return.
With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.
Beware a calm surface — you never know what lies beneath.
Whittled Away: Ireland's Vanishing Nature (Padraic Fogarty)
‘Ireland’s natural heritage is being steadily whittled away by human exploitation, pollution and other aspects of modern development. This could represent a serious loss to the nation.’ (Irish Government Report, 1969)
This urgent call for intervention to prevent the loss of our natural heritage is taken from a government report published in June 1969. Since then, nature in Ireland has continued to disappear at an alarming rate. Overfishing, industrial-scale farming and pollution have decimated wildlife habitats and populations. In a single lifetime, vast shoals of herring, rivers bursting with salmon, and bogs alive with flocks of curlew and geese have all become folk memories. Coastal and rural communities are struggling to survive; the foundations of our tourism and agricultural sectors are being undermined. The lack of political engagement frequently sees the state in the European Court of Justice for breaches of environmental law.
Pádraic Fogarty authoritatively charts how this grim failure to manage our natural resources has impoverished our country. But all is not lost: he also reveals the possibilities for the future, describing how we can fill our seas with fish, farm in tune with nature, and create forests that benefit both people and wildlife. He calls for the return of long-lost species like wild boar, cranes and wolves, showing how nature and wildlife can recover hand in hand.
A provocative call to arms, Whittled Away presents an alternative path that could lead us all to a brighter future.
Woodbine Books, Lower Main Street, Kilcullen, Ireland.
