This quietly extraordinary novel charts the 1960s coming of age of James, a child of drizzly, peaty, whisky-and-blood Catholicism in rural Ireland. From smoky cottage kitchens filled with workhorse women and taciturn, dung-smeared men, to the sun-scorched, purgatorial French vineyards of the final chapters, Bernice Friesen's art is finely honed and gracefully wielded, her darkly beautiful images inseparable from her thematic purpose.
Reviewed by Jim Bartley.
