The River Capture (eBook)

Mary Costello lives in Galway. Her short story collection, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Novel of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards and was named overall Irish Book of the Year. The River Capture, her second novel, was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Dalkey Book Awards and the Kerry Group Awards.

The River Capture is breathtaking. It is profound in the most bruising way; elegant, and then thrillingly savage; expansive, but masterfully precise, and full of sentences that made me choke on jealous rage. Costello is in a different class altogether

Mary Costello's writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand - call them themes; they are the kind of problems that make a writer

A novel of glorious abundance: reverent and angry and earthy and spiritual. Costello takes the familiar and transforms it, again and again, into soaring meditations on love, sensuality, human cruelty. To read The River Capture is to witness a writer in evolution, taking her work to a whole new level. This is a bold, sophisticated, beautiful novel, both a homage to Joyce and a deeply personal and contemporary work

A hypnotic read revealing how the ebb and flow of memory, family loyalty and love can disrupt the current of a life

Powerful . . . The River Capture reminds us that everything is connected, that we are, as humans, not separate from the teeming world of nature around us . . . Lyrical

Adventurous in its ambitions . . . Beautifully crafted

Deft and elegant, earthy and immersing, The River Capture is a searingly close portrait of a protagonist unravelling. The legacy of Joyce, family secrets, duty and desire, hope and loneliness are the strands that wind through Luke's story. The result is utterly compelling

Intense, engrossing, a novel that constantly subverts the reader's expectation - Mary Costello is a truly startling talent

This ambitious new Irish novel sets out to follow in some daunting literary footsteps, and rewards the effort required to read it

Costello plays with the borders of psychological realism in this ruminative, dream-like novel, which sweeps up ideas about animal rights, the legacy of trauma, the fluidity of sexual experience and the purpose of art itself within the fragmenting, restlessly questioning perceptions of one man's gradual breakdown

Luminous . . . Unexpected . . . An audacious act of literary ventriloquism and one that Costello pulls off astonishingly successfully . . . Joyce devotees will discover much to enjoy in this clever homage, while fans of contemporary Irish literature will find a subtle, slightly melancholy, engrossing read

Mary Costello's audacious second novel, the successor to the Costa-shortlisted Academy Street, confirms her as one to watch . . . A homage to Joyce . . . Costello's characters have a persuasive, urgent life that leaves a lasting impression

Sublime

A Joycean love story awash with the past . . . Atmospheric. The mesmeric prose, like the river rendered is "something alive and benevolent"

An intellectual romp through language and word philosophy, and a self-confessed homage to James Joyce . . . Costello writes insightfully

Elegantly written . . . Exquisite and impressionistic prose

One of the most intriguing works by an Irish writer since Mike McCormack's Solar Bones . . . Full of tenderness, beauty and some deeply affecting human introspection

Astonishingly bittersweet and beautiful, The River Capture is a quiet, important, hypnotic book about absolutely everything. It is as near perfect as it is possible for a novel to be

One of the most surprising and original novels of 2019 . . . Exceptional . . . This is a sensory book that draws on the body to feed the mind