Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, November 2024 In September I spoke to Colin Barrett about his latest book, the novel Wild Houses (2024), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Colin is also the author of the short-story collections Young Skins (2013) and Homesickness (2022). A short story from Young Skins, ‘Calm with Horses’, was adapted by Nick Rowland into a film in 2019, starring Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar and Barry Keoghan. Years ago, I was working in book distribution when a friend first recommended that I read Young Skins. I responded petulantly to the recommendation, thinking that smalltown Irish malaise was overdone, and that I’d already read enough fiction about it. In our conversation below, Colin touches on the sweeping naivety of youth – how being dismissive, and growing out of it, is a necessary part of being a writer and, in this instance, a reader. Thankfully, I...

Brian Dillon | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 I was fifteen years old when it first appeared. I’d cycled to school as usual, survived a flummoxing maths lesson without shame, settled into the day’s second period and opened my science textbook, when I found I could not see straight. I blinked hard at the page; something remained in the way. I tried to get the object in focus, the better to banish it, but it would not resolve. The thing was not exactly there, no blurred patch or dark hole in space, instead pure absence, as if one side of reality had simply dropped away. I recall thinking that whatever this was, it would be hard to put into words. I looked up from the book and there the nothing was still, obscuring several classmates, half the blackboard and an array of chemistry equipment on the teacher’s desk. Surely I...

Catherine Hearn | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025 Having finished their new short story collection in almost one sitting, I was very glad to have the opportunity to speak with Liadan Ní Chuinn about their writing. Every One Still Here (2025) published by The Stinging Fly Press in March and Granta Books in July, has already been described by Kevin Power ‘as among the best Irish books of the 21st century’. The collection is tied together by themes of grief and haunting; the ways that the past is ever-present, as the title alludes towards. These are stories of fragile, palpable lives being played out in a supposedly post-Troubles North of Ireland. In ‘We All Go’ a young medical student grieves for his father and attempts to unearth fragments of the life he lived and the violence he endured at the hands of the British state. In ‘Russia’, complex issues of...

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...