Himself

Product Information

Tadhg can see that the girls would be falling over themselves if this fella ever had the notion to shave himself or pick up a bar of soap. For her main character, puzzled ghosts of the dead, who follow the protagonist throughout the town as if they are trying to find answers, inhabit the town of Mulderrig.

Himself | Book by Jess Kidd | Official Publisher Page | Simon

Tadhg will bring Mahony up to Rathmore House to see Shauna Burke about the room, for he has a box of strawberries for the Widow Farelly that will go over if left until tomorrow. He can see and speak to ghosts of the past, some of whom are happy to help with his plight, while others are simply afraid of him. Shaunna is Mahony's landlady who falls in love with Mahony and will let harm befall him only over her dead body. Everywhere he goes, the ghosts of the dead, human and animal, tumble out all around him, on occasion to help him.While the killer is disposing of her body the forest protects the child, covering him in ferns and ivy, branches and leaves. Mahony’s appearance in Mulderrig is not simply an inconvenient incursion for Father Quinn, the village’s crooked priest, who had almost certainly been complicit in the sudden demise of his humane predecessor Father Jim, one of Orla’s few protectors. Furthermore, an imaginary town and village seemed like an ideal place to experiment with the blending of crime fiction and other elements. Is there a shift in tone between the prologue and the following chapters, and, if so, what might the purpose be? He has been thinking of the Widow Farelly, of her new-built bungalow, the prodigious whiteness of her net curtains and the pigeon plumpness of her chest.

Himself by Jess Kidd - Publishers Weekly Himself by Jess Kidd - Publishers Weekly

Mahony and Cauley conclude that his mother must have been murdered and begin to investigate, starting with the interviewing everyone who shows up for auditions for the annual amateur play. Reading this picaresque novel is like nursing a pint in a pub while a seanchaí, a traditional storyteller, trills the air with magic and mystery and a local modulates the narrative with irreverent commentary from a stool in the corner.

Despite the fact that Jess Kidd was born and raised in London, her family is from the small town of Mayo.

Himself by Jess Kidd | Waterstones

Something about it, though a mystery, though set in Ireland, though occasionally populated with ghosts, just failed to catch my attention.In Mahony, the author has created a literary descendant of Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” (also a foundling with parental issues), and in Mulderigg she’s imagined a literary neighborhood akin to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, a place populated with eccentric characters, living and dead.