The first review of #Seaborne is in, from Mairéad Hearne at Swirl and Thread: ‘Seaborne is a superb novel, bursting with a buzzing vitality and sensuality. O’Connor has captured a time and place with an outstanding clarity. A powerful and remarkable portrayal … an exuberant and passionate novel…’
Delighted with that. Read more here.
The San Francisco Book Review has given NORA a lovely tiny review. A snip: ‘a truly impressive work of biographical fiction, Nuala O’Connor pens a powerful and incisive account of the life of Nora Joyce, who despite being remembered as “Irish literature’s greatest muse” was really a far more complex, commanding, and intriguing individual than her lasting reputation suggests.’ More here: https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/biographies-memoirs/
The Book Show, hosted by Rick O’Shea, featured NORA in its historical fiction segment. Big thanks to Breda Brown for highlighting NORA. You can listen here. (The hist fic section starts around 10:15, but Louise Nealon, on first, is also worth a listen.)
NORA is beautifully reviewed by Martina Devlin in the Irish Independent‘s Review magazine today: ‘…historical fiction brought lushly to life, laced with glorious prose…’. More here.
Thanks a mill to Eibhear Walshe for a fab review of NORA on Saturday’s Brendan O’Connor show on RTÉ Radio 1. Listen here. (Review starts about 10 minutes in.)
The panel also discusses Julia Parry’s The Shadowy Third which I reviewed for Books Ireland magazine. An excellent read, one of my books of the year, for sure. My review of that is here.
Afric McGlinchey gives NORA a wonderful review in the Dublin Review of Books. ‘In language brimming with evocative imagery and energy, O’Connor resurrects a life ‑ and a love ‑ of magnificent intensity.’ More here.
A beautiful review of NORA by Laura King in Books Ireland. Read it here.
My first New York Times review today and it’s for my beloved NORA. Big thanks to Alida Becker. I’ve pasted the entire thing in below; a swift flavour though: ‘…Nora is entirely convincing in her raw sensuality, her stubborn determination, her powerful sense of grievance.’ Very pleased 🙂
NEW YORK TIMES – 16th March 2021
Three Historical Novels Explore the Strength of Human Connection – Alida Becker
“Messy” doesn’t begin to describe the domestic life of the narrator of Nuala O’Connor’s NORA (Harper Perennial, 458 pp., paper, $16.99), the minimally educated, relentlessly blue-collar woman who propped up one of literature’s most challenging highbrow writers, James Joyce. There are times when you wonder whether the real Nora Barnacle would have been quite so articulate (“he’s also a bother to my heart and a conundrum to my mind”), but this fictional Nora is entirely convincing in her raw sensuality, her stubborn determination, her powerful sense of grievance and her inability to stop loving a deeply erratic, wildly manipulative yet enormously talented man.
You won’t find much about Joyce’s works in Nora’s account of his torturous climb from poverty-stricken anonymity to professional acclaim. (“Portrait of the Artist” comes off as “strings of baby babble” to someone who prefers “penny dreadfuls and romances.”) You will, however, be given an intimate look at the struggle that made Joyce’s work possible as Nora describes how she followed along when he fled Ireland for dead-end jobs in Switzerland and Italy, watched him waste his paychecks on carousing while she took in washing for grocery money, and let herself become far too reliant on his long-suffering brother after the Joyce entourage grew to include a son and a daughter.
Set against all this, Nora’s small triumphs loom large. In Paris in 1925, two decades after she first “walked out” with Joyce, the now-middle-aged Nora proudly announces that “at last I have a home to call my own and furniture besides.” Her money worries may be gone, but now there are worries about her children, particularly Lucia, with that “skittery-skattery look” in her eyes, who will eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenic and confined to a mental hospital. Even Nora’s uterine cancer (“the doctor now says the whole lot has to come out”) and Joyce’s glaucoma (“the eyes are murder; 10 operations later and it’s worse they get”) can’t distract her from a terrible sense of guilt: “How can I tell him that between us we may have made our daughter mad?”
Alida Becker is a former editor at the Book Review.
