This Is the Way
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Anthony Sonaghan is hiding out in an old tenement house in Dublin: he fears he's reignited an ancient feud between the two halves of his family. Twenty-first-century Dublin may have shopping malls and foreign exchange students, but Anthony is from an Irish Travelling community, where blood ties are bound deeply to the past. When his roguish uncle Arthur shows up on his doorstep with a missing toe, delirious and apparently on the run, history and its troubles are following close behind him—and Anthony will soon have to face the question of who he really is. In prose of exceptional vividness, Gavin Corbett brings us a narrator with the power to build a new, previously unimagined world. His language, shot through with dreams and myths, summons a vision of Ireland in which a premodern spirit has somehow survived into contemporary life, brooding and overlooked. Funny, terrible, unsettling, fiercely unsentimental, This Is the Way is haunted by some of Ireland's greatest writers even as it breaks new ground and asks afresh why the imagination is so necessary to survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irish writer Corbett's second novel introduces Anthony Sonaghan, a member of Ireland's travelling or gypsy community. Anthony is " low for a time" in Dublin, amongst the "settled people." What he's hiding from is a long history of bad blood between the two ruling travelling families, the Sonaghans and the Gillaroos, a history which culminated in his brother's recent suicide. In Dublin, Anthony meets Judith Neill, a librarian, who gives him a notebook and encourages him to write down his family history. Though Judith genuinely admires Anthony as representative of a vanishing culture in need of preservation, when she invites him and his uncle Arthur, who has come to live with him, to her home in a posh part of town, they feel patronized by her intellectual friends and she discovers, just like many before her, that there are consequences to crossing a Sonaghan. Uncle Arthur is present for much of the novel, though he does little to illuminate Anthony's character or drive the narrative forward, which gives it a certain inertia at times. But this book is about voice, and Corbett is brilliant at creating an utterly original and beautiful language to portray this young man's alienation from the world. An inventive and beguiling book.
