The Wax Child
Women who really do work magic, condemned by a court that manufactures its evidence anyway.
Theme
Violence
Fiction tracing acts of harm — physical, systemic and intimate — and the long aftermath they leave behind.
Reviews filed under this theme.
Paradais
A gardener paid in rum to hear out the boy next door, turning a nightly fantasy into a plan.
Butcher's Crossing
A young man bankrolls a buffalo hunt to find himself in nature, and finds a machine that pays nobody.
All Them Dogs
Violence taken up as courtship in West Dublin, turning every order from a lover into a form of love.
Helen of Nowhere
A disgraced professor's self-knowledge restaged as evidence, ending in a shape borrowed from every story about men like him.
The Mulai
An archaeologist's report passed off as ethnography, compiling a whole society out of one man's failure to tell people apart.
Dooneen
A wounded man writes from a cliff-cut room as Dublin’s housing uprising ends in massacre and contested record.
The Disappearers
A rehearsal room in 1988 Kingston becomes the site of an attack whose aftermath spreads through aliases, testimony, revenge and return.
At Night All Blood is Black
A failed mercy killing repeated on strangers as restitution, ending in an act the army's procedure cannot absorb.
Lázár
A Hungarian family learns to survive through concealment, then enters a century that turns concealment into policy.
She Who Remains
Measuring the cost of remaining alive when survival requires self-erasure.
Of Cattle and Men
A slaughter system absorbs labour, appetite and waste, processing even catastrophe back into order.