Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, July 2023 Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence, is about Malcolm Macarthur, who, in 1982, murdered a nurse, Bridie Gargan, and a farmer, Dónal Dunne. Macarthur was from an aristocratic background, but at the time of the murders he was on the brink of bankruptcy and risked losing his leisured lifestyle. His actions were part of a flawed plan to rob a bank, characterised by what O’Connell has called ‘the peculiar foolishness of the intellectual’, and Macarthur was eventually arrested at the home of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, a friend of Macarthur’s, who had no idea he was hiding a fugitive. The resulting political scandal almost brought down Charles Haughey’s government. The unlikely events were famously summarised by the acronym GUBU: grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. Macarthur served thirty years in prison for the murders. O’Connell is strangely haunted by Macarthur’s...

Tim MacGabhann | Tolka, Issue Three, May 2023 As I get older I find myself better able to let things live under their own aspect: isolated, apart – like a single dart of seed blown from a dandelion or the colours in Cézanne which become their own blocks of solidity – as though beyond form. It’s a young person’s illness to look backwards so much. When I knew Sam I was coming into the last of those years when I might have been able to think of myself as young: that is to say, in those years when I already felt as though I were no longer young. When you get past those years, you start to feel young again. You don’t want them back, either. The low burnish of things as they are is enough: that gleam on the rim of a cup, early in the morning, a weathervane...

Joanna Pidcock | Tolka, Web Only, September 2023 Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it? Yes, it is, in a good way. I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you?? In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’,...

Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 Entry My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us. I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural. It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers. The East...