Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of 2024. John Lavin The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid) is surely an important book, giving the reader a more unfettered insight into the mind of the great poet than the equally essential Stepping Stones (Heaney’s autobiography-by-interview with Dennis O’Driscoll). Immediately the lapsed Heaney…
After Christmas – always – Childermas:* Slaughter of Innocents; Threat Neutralised. The Prince of War, glistening with success, allures us. This, he says, is what you want. Not a stable, sheep-herding losers, a star. [* In the biblical account of the birth of Christ at Bethlehem, King Herod has all…
Three poems for the season by Angela Graham: ‘Balthazar’, ‘Melchior’ and ‘Caspar’. Balthazar When the roads turned into streets and the streets to lanes and the lanes to alleys I became suspicious. I suspected … … something we had not prepared for. Our retinue had fallen more and more behind as…
Dan Tyte reads a Christmas short story as part of our Winter Readings series of podcasts. Millennial identical twins Gerard and Stephanie are back home for Christmas Day. Expect family politics with all the trimmings. The stand-alone story also acts as the first chapter of Tyte’s latest novel, The Offline Project (The Big Issue called…
The boy never goes outside so his skin is as pale as the moon. Beside him on the sofa, two cats are curled, one purring and rubbing its rasping tongue against his hand, its fur warm and soft, while the other is stiff and dead. The boy strokes each cat in turn. He makes no…
Outside The Goat’s Head he stops and spits, the ball of phlegm steaming on the frosted pavement. The bouncer eyeballs him, so Henryk pushes his tongue out between yellowed teeth. Raises a dirty middle finger, the nail cracked and bloody. A blackness swells around his heart. This is the true meaning of Christmas: drink, maybe…
Being always so goose-pimpled, luminous and hush-hush-hushy-it’ll-be-grand, she could make him cry at the drop of an eyelash. And all because Father Apollo had spat into her mouth at choir practice once, when she was a teenager. But he couldn’t say anything to Mrs. Phelan, or Cassandra, as she liked him to call her, not…