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Falling Animals: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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I could quickly inhale this gem in one sitting, but it's one not to rush; take your time and savour the haunting, evocative, pitch perfect prose and dialect. Told through a chorus of voices, Falling Animals follows the crosshatching threads of lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present. She is the author of two books: How To Gut A Fish (2022), a collection of short stories, and Falling Animals (2023), her debut novel. The stories span several decades and different continents and are told in 17 chapters dedicated to each one of the characters.

I know that some people had included this in their Booker predictions and it’s a shame that it wasn’t longlisted. She often decides to lock the door, draw the shutters and sit for a time on one of the hard plastic chairs. The officer in charge jumps at what seems a lead that will close the case only to feel a fool when it proves to be a fraud. The only issue is that the book seems to lose focus from this and concentrate on the lives of these other characters, which I enjoyed aspects of, but ultimately found myself constantly thinking 'yes, but what about the man?Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Die korte beschrijvingen waren erg treffend, het leek alsof je even kort andere mensenlevens in keek. Sheila Armstrong makes this case feel particularly authentic, switching gears after a short story collection for a melancholic, sombre tale that just left me awed at some of the word choices here - Armstrong has such a mastery of the turning of the phase it's hard not to be wowed. Very different; I liked the different chapters focussing on the individuals and how they may, or may not, be linked to the deceased.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I hope Falling Animals gets published in the US; while it is set in Ireland it, the man could have been found on any remote beach in a small town. Sat cross legged staring out at sea, his identity is a mystery but while this may be the opening of the story it is not it’s beginning. It is a novel of rare artistry and elegance, a really unique and sublime experience, one not to be missed!A very fine debut which reminded me a little of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 in both its structure and the quality of its writing. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I was worried towards the middle where we veered quite off piece, but circled back round to the central mystery of the man on the beach. It brings us from Ireland and Scotland to Iceland and the South West of Australia, with characters young and old, each with their very real thoughts and feelings. Every chapter in this book is from the viewpoint of a different person, and how they were affected by this man in real life, or by the discovery of his body.

The police can find nothing to identify the man nor any obvious cause of death besides the cancer that the pathologist finds riddling his body. Anyway, sadly as much as I was so convinced I would love Falling Animals from the blurb (and yes, the cover), it didn't really work for me as a whole. At its heart it has an unexplained death, a man found at the edge of a beach in a small coastal town in North West Ireland and the quest to find out who he was, but it is so much more than that. A year to the day after the man’s death, a memorial is unveiled filled with names of those who’ve perished at sea. The protagonists include: a man collecting the dead body of a seal; the woman who finds the body; the pathologist that examines it – and later her daughter; an artist suffering with MS and earlier her son – who also saw the man; the bus driver who drove the man to the town; a refugee who takes the man’s backpack where he had discarded it; a Filipino seaman on the skeleton staffed ship which wrecked; the galley cook on the ship – who ends up running the café in the town; the boy who started the fire accidentally – in a panic after seeing an apparent person on the wreck (which he keeps secret); a diver who investigates the wreck for salvage photos and also panics – this time seeing bones (which again he does not mention); a Colombian who now runs the town’s bar – his lover the man who as a boy set the wreck on fire (a secret he keeps until a painting the artist makes uncovers his memories); a woman who claims the dead man is her husband; a Guard (policeman) who is involved with much of this; a priest at an Australian seafearers mission who encounters someone we realise is the man who decides, very ill, to set out for Ireland having seen a picture of the wreck; a man serving on a gunship protecting Icelandic ships in the cod wars.Each chapter then tells the story of a different character from that town, their stories separate but connected and overlapping. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Against the backdrop of a shipwreck off a remote coast of Ireland, we are given a glimpse into the minds and lives of various characters who are connected to it in some way over different time periods. Literary, lyrical prose gives a sense of wonder; drawing from a real case lending an air of authority to it. They pay dearly for hope, but bodies are money and money is bodies; this has always been the way of it.

Sure, these are people no stranger to strangeness washing up on their shores, from strandings to shipwrecks; they’ve seen it all over the years. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.It spans a year in which the authorities try to trace the identity of a corpse found on an Irish beach one August morning. Poignantly, in the final chapter the dead are given a voice but the novel ends on a life-affirming note. I remember this story when it was happening in real life and it totally captured the country for a while. Each character feels a portrait of someone I know or have known in my own life, and there is such a care and attention paid to the evocation of the world around the characters that they feel even more true to life.

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