Falling Animals: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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This very atmospheric novel is told as a mosaic of multiple points of view, each chapter a short story about a different character's sometimes fleeting connection to the unidentified dead body found on the windswept Irish beach. I had just added this one to my wishlist on the basis of another review, so you’ve now firmly cemented its place there and pushed it up my priority list!

Over the course of the next year, a story is told through multiple people, some from the town and some from away. Against the backdrop of a shipwreck off a remote coast of Ireland, we are given a glimpse into the minds and lives of various characters who are connected to it in some way over different time periods.Matías looks at the painting and back at his partner—this gentle man who wakes up with terrible bed hair, has a habit of falling asleep in the cinema, who could burn a glass of water, who he is planning to ask to marry him—and he is suddenly a stranger, a pulsing cloud of acidic dread. On June 16th, 2009, the body of a man was discovered on a beach in Sligo and, to this day, how he ended up there is shrouded in mystery. In Falling Animals, Sheila Armstrong imagines a fictional account of this man’s story, told from the points of view of the villagers who came into contact with him in his final days. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

The prose is poetic but the narrative doesn’t suffer for it, the mystery is lurking in the background edging you forwards. A months long investigation turns up nothing about who he was or came from, but the community have taken him into their hearts, claiming him as one of their own.Nothing I’ve never experienced before (in recent memory, Fernanda Melchor did the sprawling multi-character narrative centred on a dead person much more effectively than this ) but I found that there were elements of this book that simply would not have been possible were it written by someone else.

After she’s given her statement, Oona walks to the village pub to steady her nerves and regale her fellow drinkers with her news. Toch verliest het boek uiteindelijk een beetje de focus op het achterliggende verhaal van de overleden man. Each character feels a portrait of someone I know or have known in my own life, and there is such a care and attention paid to the evocation of the world around the characters that they feel even more true to life. His hands are folded neatly in his lap, his ankles are crossed, and a faint smile is on his otherwise lifeless face. Despite glowing reviews from GR readers I follow, I was hesitant to pick up this debut novel by Sheila Armstrong, for no other reason than she is Irish.Literary, lyrical prose gives a sense of wonder; drawing from a real case lending an air of authority to it. However, the main reason I enjoyed the novel is the expert way in which Armstrong imagines the lives of various villagers, revealing the things that make them happy and the troubles that keep them awake at night. Armstrong deftly weaves these threads into the story of the village whose fortunes have declined over the years, and the shipwreck, one of many along this difficult coastline.