GREAT CIRCLE
At more than 600 pages, Great Circle does indeed boast an impressive girth.
The narrative is split between Marian Graves, who disappeared in 1950 while trying to fly the globe, and Hollywood star Hadley Baxter, who in 2010s LA has just sent her career spiralling with an intentionally scandalous hook-up.
When Hadley is offered the role of the daring aviatrix in a forthcoming film, she immediately notices the parallels: both were orphaned and raised by their uncles. As women navigating courses through men’s worlds, however, the similarities go beyond the superficial.
This is a sweepingly panoramic novel with equally expansive themes courage, independence, love, art whose backdrop is the history of aviation itself.
Lisa McInerneyâs debut The Glorious Heresies won two major prizes and her follow-up The Blood Miracles another, so you might think her biggest concern ahead of the publication of The Rules of Revelation, the third and last of the set, would be making space on the mantelpiece. But no â she might live near Lady Gregoryâs estate but she is not the Queen of Coole.
âThe nerves are at me big-time,â she says, âIâm a real hoor for attention. It has to be good attention, though. Youâre not supposed to read your bad reviews but I got one and it gutted me, and that was four years ago and I havenât recovered. Iâm supposed to be a cool writer â I want to be like Mr Banville who just doesnât care. I still feel like an emerging writer, three books in, still struggling out of the hedge.â
The Rules of Revelation is the concluding instalment in Lisa McInerney’s self-described unholy trinity of novels about drug lords and sex workers in modern-day Cork. It centres on the illegal habits
Irish novelists Anne Enright and Lisa McInerney have been shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, a £30,000 prize awarded for any original novel written in English and published in the U.K.
Enright, one of Ireland’s best-known writers, was nominated for her 2015 novel The Green Road, which focuses on four siblings who return home when their mother announces her intent to sell their childhood home in the west of Ireland. She also currently serves as Ireland’s Fiction Laureate.
On the other end of the shortlist is McInerney, whose debut novel The Glorious Heresies, which centers on the Cork criminal underworld, was nominated. McInerney, who had only written one short story before embarking on the novel, was recently called “the most talented writer at work today in Ireland” by the Irish Times, in part due to her blog, founded in 2006, which she described as “a gonzo version of working-class Ireland.” It is appropriately called Arse End of Ireland.