Doreen Cunningham | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 Noreen Masud’s memoir, A Flat Place, explores the flatlands of Britain, as well as reflecting on her upbringing in Pakistan and Scotland, through a mixture of literary criticism and anti-romantic nature writing. A Flat Place contains stories of brutality, the patriarchy, colonial violence and the erasure of histories of people of colour. Noreen’s experience of living with what she hesitantly defines as complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (c-PTSD) is a many-layered account of childhood trauma with no single cause or event. Noreen describes how, along with her siblings and mother, she was confined by her father inside their house, and how she found solace in glimpses of her first flat place, open fields near where she lived in Lahore as a child: I waited, every morning, as the dawn mists rose over Lahore, for the car to round the corner and open...

Julia Merican | Tolka, Web Only, April 2024 Amina Cain’s writing articulates seemingly small, peripheral things that nonetheless hold us in their thrall with bewitching precision: the specific sadness of candlelight dancing across a solitary dinner table; how we catalogue our encounters with books that have moved us; the pleasure of going out to buy the persimmons and the butter, of sinking into a painting after a long day of labour, of meeting a friend after a spell of loneliness. Cain is the author of the short-story collections, I Go to Some Hollow (2009) and Creature (2013), the novel Indelicacy (2020), and A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022), a series of essayistic enquiries. She spoke to me from Los Angeles in October 2023.  Julia Merican (JM): When I knew I was going to be speaking to you, I started to read the interviews you’d already had with other people....

Isobel O’Donovan | Tolka Issue Four, February 2025 I remember my mother’s voice in the kitchen, as though choruses of her could spill from an opened cupboard. Among the delft and vocal cords, a nestle of laughs and cries pushed through the yellow yolk of the sun streaming through the window. My infant head laid on her chest, ear pressed to lung like a shell whispering of the sea. The place where sleep seeps through a tablecloth like spilt milk, ink. When the Internet unfastens my limbs from my mind, it is to this warm, lullabied body that I long to return. Something punctures the memory – a niggling feeling of is that all? Such multitudes of experience shaped into an apron by the cookiecutter of nostalgia. It’s better now, I think, as the clock counts hours that are just for me, no nappy cloth frozen solid on the line....

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 This Plague of Souls is Mike McCormack’s fourth novel. It follows Nealon, an artist who has returned from prison following the collapse of a criminal trial against him. His family home in rural Mayo is empty, and he is besieged by phone calls from a stranger determined to meet up. The third act of the novel stages this meeting against the backdrop of a national security crisis. Through a breadth and style that is typical of McCormack’s writing, the distinctions between the local and the global begin to break down: ‘Those oil spills and poisoned lakes, those great gyres of plastic waste spiralling in the southern Atlantic. There were things coming apart, falling from their proper being’. McCormack is the author of the novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005), as well as the short-story collections Getting It in...