The intention was, of course, to bring her out to Winterwood - to that magical place that only me and her knew - but I wouldn't tell her that until much later on, for I wanted it to be as much of a surprise as possible. On a return to his home place in the mountainy middle of Ireland, Redmond Hatch meets old Pappie Strange, a fiddler and teller of tales whose honeyed words and giddy reels have persuaded the local mothers and fathers, anxious at the loss of traditional values, to bring their little lambs to his Saturday morning ceilidhs. Once, in Kilburn, married to the sugar-lipped Catherine, and sharing his daughter Immy's passion for "My Little Pony", with its enchanted kingdom of Winterwood, Redmond was happy. But then infidelity, betrayal and the 'scary things' from which he would protect his daughter steal into the magic kingdom, and the bad things begin to happen. Now Redmond - once little Red - prowls the barren outlands alone, haunted by the disgraced shade of Ned Strange. A shape-shifter, Red reinvents himself as Dominic Tiernan, builds a new life in TV, finds a new wife and begins to know domestic happiness once more. Then one day, in Dublin, he spies Catherine again. Like the best old songs and folk tales, this is a story both simple and complex, shot through with recurring themes and motifs, ribbons of song, rags of lore.
Full of raucous humour and savage satire, "Winterwood" taps deep into the old, dark, unseen places below the shiny surface of modern Ireland. It is Patrick McCabe's most disturbing, original and accomplished novel yet.
Ronan Bennett
Zugzwang
Lana Citron