Young Irelanders

In the space of twenty years Ireland has gone from a land of high unemployment and emigration to one of the five richest countries in the world. The stories in Donavan's Young Irelanders magnify the New Ireland and illuminate how the Irish are coping with its rewards and pressures: immigration, mid-life crisis, adultery and divorce, a lost sense of place and history, and of course, what to do with all that prosperity. This is an important new chapter in the career of a top-flight literary writer.

Publishers Weekly

Donovan (Julius Winsome) writes convincingly about loss and survival in an Ireland where big gaps remain between what his characters want and what they have. The aging, recently fired electronics salesman narrating "Harry Dietz" drives on and on one morning in his bathrobe until he's pulled over and has to take a good look at himself. One of several stories about absent parents, "Glass," follows a young boy who stops speaking after his father is killed, and his mother, trying to pretend she isn't a widow, accepts an inadequate substitute for her dead husband. Lyrical passages are less effective in such stories as "By Irish Nights," which buries a tragic boating story within a description of Ireland's metaphorical and literal wanderers, cast adrift by politics and a troubled economy. In the main, however, Donovan has a spareness that matches the bleak lives he chronicles. (July)

Gerard Donovan is the author of the novels Julius Winsome and Schopenhauer's Telescope. He lives in New York City.