I decided to read something different from the usual thrillers and historical fiction. When Light is Like Water by Molly McCloskey sounded like the right pick for me and I liked the setting. I have read a few books set in Ireland and liked most of them. This book is mainly set in Dublin, Ireland. However, I was surprised when I found mentions of my country and city. Nairobi features briefly in the story but it was still good to read names of places that I know. There were also mentions of Daadab in Kenya which is one of the biggest refugee camps in the world. My only issue is that, it sounds like the camp is in Nairobi which is not the case. Dadaab and Nairobi are about 12 hours apart (by road). However, the inaccuracy didn’t bother me much since Kenya wasn’t the main setting of the book.

The story is narrated from Alice’s perspective. It is not chronological and this bugged me a bit. I mean it can be confusing when a character dies on one page and then they are alive on the next one. However, the story is narrated through flashbacks hence the ‘back and forth’ order. In addition, Alice has conversations in present that brings memories from the past. I think this is what we do in real life. Our memories are up and down(all over the place). Different things spark different memories. After the initial confusion, I soon got the hang of it and started enjoying the book.

This is a slow-paced book that makes you think about life and what it means to be truly happy. Alice talks about her marriage, affair and the yearning for something better. You know how at times we sit and wonder if there is something out there that is better than what we have. Not just in terms of relationships but even careers, homes, cars…everything really. Even if things are going great, sometimes you may wonder if they could be better than just great. This is what Alice’s affair made me think about. There are other things that she said that made me smile. For instance; she talks about meeting an ex and remarks about how sometimes, the feeling that we get from such encounters is not nostalgia but it is actually foolishness. I know that feeling…the… what the hell was I thinking that comes when you think/see an ex at times.

Alice is the kind of character who is easy to dislike. However, I liked her. I found her to be relatable. She made mistakes that made her seem selfish at times but at the same time, too err is human, right? I thought the book depicted the realities of life. I may not agree with her decisions but I understand why she made them. I sympathized with her. She seemed so lost. Apart from marriage and affairs, the book also covers mother-daughter relationships. The relationship between Alice and her mom was mostly sad,complex but I liked reading about it.

Slow paced novels have always been a challenge for me and I did struggle with the pace. However, I still enjoyed the story. The themes of love and life were so well portrayed. It was easy to sympathize with Alice despite her flaws. The writing is beautiful. Unstructured but it still had a flow to it. It felt like Alice was seated next to me, just talking about her life and I enjoyed listening to her although hers was not a happy story.

A story about life, love, loss and adultery. This is a short story written like a memoir with brilliant descriptions of Ireland.

Review copy courtesy of Penguin (UK) via NetGalley, many thanks.

An exploration of the idea of home and whether it can be found or created - birthplace, the parent/child relationship, marriage, friends and work colleagues? The word must mean a different thing to different people in different circumstances, but I sympathised strongly with Alice’s story. Growing up in a one-parent family, her father largely absent from her life, she feels her home is incomplete and goes looking for a place to call her own.

Not long out of college and feeling adrift in the world, Alice sets off from America to see what Europe might hold, landing up on the west coast of Ireland. Here she meets and marries Eddie, and embarks on a serious attempt to find ‘home’ in a soulmate. Who wouldn’t want to settle down with Eddie? Handsome, successful, non-judgemental, generous, he would be easy to fall in love with. He is also overwhelmingly confident of his place in the world and that place is Sligo, which he would never want to leave. Alice, attracted at first to the idea of ‘dissolving’ into his life, cannot in the end fully commit herself to that future. Describing the summer before their break-up, ‘there are things we’re unable to say even to ourselves, things we can only enact, as though we cannot believe they are what we really want until they become the only alternative we’ve left ourselves’. The poignancy of the failure of their marriage is that maybe if they’d met at a different stage in their lives it would have worked, but at the time she needs to explore other options.

Alone again, she spends many years serving with the UN in challenging environments round the world, samples a different kind of home in the institutionalised camaraderie of expatriates, before returning to Ireland to contemplate her next move. The story is narrated from this point in time, a bruisingly honest unpicking of her life during and after the Eddie years, with a keen sense of regret for what might have been. On the upbeat side, she also celebrates a revitalised relationship with her mother, her first ‘home’, and this struck quite a chord with me - the recognition by a child that its parent has a life of their own to lead and that being a parent is just part of that.

I was very taken with Alice’s sobering thought of the narrowing of the available world that comes with age. ‘…I know that, like all children, I overlooked much and took everything for granted, and that even into the early years of adulthood, when I thought about the world at all, in that way, I mistakenly assumed that all of its good, beautiful things would come around again, and then again, and again, until the time was right for me to pluck them. Now, I am old enough to know that there are people I would like to see again whom I have already seen for the last time, there are places I dream of returning to that I will never revisit, and that though a few things do come around again and offer themselves, many more do not.’

A superbly well written, insightful story that I related to on many levels, I’ll be recommending this to everyone I know.

Alice is a young American girl who is travelling in Ireland where she meets her husband to be, Eddie. She leaves behind her mother who has brought her up on her own. Beautifully written, this novel moves seamlessly between different time periods in Alice's life as she reflects on it. Alice's marriage to Eddie doesn't last, partly because of her affair with Cauley. The meditations in this book allow the reader to go with flow and not become embroiled in the emotional upheavals of Alice's life or indeed with Alice herself. It's a tribute to McCloskey's writing that this in no way detracts from the book as we are instead embedded in her memories and contemplations. In less skilled hands, readers could become distracted or even bored as the narrative meanders along but in this case I was absorbed by these relationships and the way they were rendered. I think the title captures the atmosphere of the book completely.

Molly McCloskey's newest novel may seem like a simple read given its sparse length, but what is contained within this book's pages runs so very deep. When Light is Like Water is a hugely intimate portrayal of passion, love and the darker shadows both cast on our lives.

Our protagonist, Alice, an American, sits in her mother's condo in Florida after her funeral. She looks back on her life, how its ebbs and flows, and we are drawn into her memories: of being raised alone by her mother in America; of her first summer in Ireland and moving there in her 20s; of meeting her husband, Eddie, in Sligo and their few years together; and her subsequent passionate affair with Cauley, which leads to the crumbling of her marriage. At the same time her affair is revealed to her husband, her relationship with Cauley dissipates, leaving her alone and with the realisation that the feeling of unrest, anxiety and dispassion you sometimes feel in relationships cannot be erased by someone else.

I am not giving anything away here: the author reveals when this book opens that she is no longer with Eddie and alludes to her affair with Cauley. This story is not plot-driven, but more an exploration of the memories and experiences of a woman and how it impacts her life and her future. And it works really well. Alice's narration effectively captures the person she is: at the start, she is aimless, unsteady, cocky almost, but by the novel's close she has been granted a sense of profound maturity and acceptance. Her story is compelling and we are drawn easily into her world, regardless of whether we can relate to her situation or not.

The revelation of Alice's affair, which you would expect to be the ultimate climax of the novel, doesn't have the drama you would imagine. It is dealt with briefly and not given the attention some may feel it warrants, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. As I mentioned before, this book isn't plot driven. We stay with Alice when she recounts the end of her marriage; the exploration of it is insular, as I expected. There is a simplicity to its closing; an acceptance.

As the novel ends, Alice is looking towards the future, having come to terms with what has happened in her life and committing herself to not being bound by the habit of reliving her past. Our changed narrator has a more mature and steady mind, showing a progression that is rare for such a concise story.

I really enjoyed When Light is Like Water. It is a tender and intimate look at love - love for a mother, love for a husband and love for a lover, the value of family and connection, and the notion of home. It is as personal as a memoir and as powerful as a novel twice its size. Beautifully written and wholly absorbing.