Academy Street.
by Costello, Mary, 1963-
- Used
- Hardcover
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
-
Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Ireland 109cma Costello, Mary, 1963- . Academy Street. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2014, 145 pages. Fine in dust jacket. $6.50 Box A 109
Summary: "A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer. Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely--a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City. Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right. Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian). Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life"--
Notes: Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, 2014; Winner of the Irish Book Awards, Book of the Year, 2014; Winner of Easons Novel of the Year.
Reviews
“Another vocation, then, reading, akin, even, to falling in love, she thought, stirring, as it did, the kind of emotions and extreme feelings she desired, feelings of innocence and longing that returned her to those vaguely perfect states she had experienced as a child.”
Academy Street is the first novel by Irish author, Mary Costello. It chronicles the life of Teresa Lohan, from her youth in rural Ireland in the 1940s through her time in New York and her return to Ireland in her sixties. Tess is seemingly unremarkable, both as a child and an adult: a shy, sensitive child; a woman with an essential loneliness (“It seemed at times that she was marooned on an island, a moat of water, wide and black, separating her from all human love.”); a mother who feels she could have done better. Nonetheless, Costello’s exquisite prose conveys this life with such emotion, such care, that the reader cannot help but be moved. Costello paints her character so vividly, so completely, that the reader can identify with Tess, her feelings (“…the mark of all anxiety: the acute awareness of the endless possibilities that can simultaneously imperil and enhance us, and all that might be lost or gained.”), her ideas (“It [Ireland] seemed to her now to be a place without dreams, or where dreaming was prohibited. Here, life could be lived at a higher, truer pitch. Though her own was a timid life, there was, since Theo’s birth, a yearning towards motion and spirit and vitality.”), her reactions (“She thought of the water that had lain quietly calm, each tiny drop, each molecule, restful, suddenly wrenched, catapulted through a metal rotary, tossed back out into the turbulent current, reeling, confounded, changed.”). In both style and content, this novel is reminiscent of Sebastian Barry’s work, in particular, “On Canaan’s Side”. A remarkable debut novel.
(Log in or Create an Account first!)
Details
- Bookseller
- Focloir (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- Ireland 109cma
- Title
- Academy Street.
- Author
- Costello, Mary, 1963-
- Format/Binding
- Fine
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2014,
- Pages
- 145
- Weight
- 0.00 lbs
- Keywords
- Ireland
- Bookseller catalogs
- Ireland Irish History and Literature; Irish in America; Novel;
Terms of Sale
Focloir
About the Seller
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- New
- A new book is a book previously not circulated to a buyer. Although a new book is typically free of any faults or defects, "new"...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- A.N.
- The book is pristine and free of any defects, in the same condition as ...