All that glitters...
by Patrick O'Connor
THE drive home was slow: the flat tyre made it seem to last a lifetime. Even my usual game of mimicking other drivers didn’t help.
A lone packet of vegetable lasagne stared back at me from the middle shelf of my otherwise bare freezer. I kicked off my shoes and tried to relax, but the mistakes I’d made earlier at work kept sneaking into my thoughts.
Afterlife by Sean O'Brien (Picador)
by Patrick O'Connor
THE organisers of a poetry festival in the fictious town of Divott near the Welsh border want to reintern the body of celebrated poet Jane Jarmain, a move that forces her one-time friend Martin Stone to look back on events in a sultry summer in the 70s.
Stone was obsessed by poet Thomas Exton and back in the 70s felt that his own troubled, drug-fuelled lifestyle shared parallels with the 17th century scribe.