- Colmcille Press
- Mar 18
- 2 min read
A TERRIFIC review of Conor Bowman's short-story collection 'The Half-Life of Edith Hopkins' by Anne Cunningham has this week been published in several regional Irish newspapers. She writes:
In my review of a previous Bowman book some years ago, I wondered why there isn’t more pot-banging about this author. He easily matches many of our big literary talents and paddles in the same thematic streams but seems to be somehow overlooked. I have no idea why, but I admired Horace Winter Says Goodbye a lot, and this new anthology of short stories is even better.
The title story is a novella and traces the life of Edith Hopkins, retired piano teacher, now scraping through her final days, riven with dementia in a nursing home. The fog of her half-memories leads to a clearing as we are taken through her life; a promising tennis career ruined by a spell in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, the trafficking of her son to America, never to be seen again and the half-life she lived afterwards.
It’s harrowing but elegantly told and not the only story containing the suffering of memory. An old man travels from his New England home to a disused railway station in County Galway to re-live a memory of his grandfather. He never returns.
In a stylish flight of fancy, an author is summoned to a sumptuous supper in an exclusive Stephen’s Green club, only to be met by characters from his many works of fiction, ‘brought to life’ as it were, from the page.
I could pot-bang on and on, but alas a short review can’t do justice to this gem of an anthology. It is one of my highlights so far this year.
Bowman's new work, which focuses on the Tuam Mother & Baby Home, has also recently featured in the Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph – and on BBC Radio Ulster's Sunday Sequence Programme.
