This is an imaginative scifi legal thriller set in 2095. It's mostly engaging, and has good pacing. The author is pretty creative and shows some talent, and tells a compelling story with an interesting approach to running the courts. I hope he continues to write.

Thanks very much for the review copy!!

A great collection of short stories. I enjoyed each selection. I received an arc from the publisher and Netgalley and this is my unbiased review.

I gave this book of short stories 4 stars because the stories deal with grief, loss, lost love, heartbreak, real love spanning different countries such as Ireland of course, Paris, Spain, Taipei and other locations. These 12 stories were sometimes heartbreaking but out of the 12 stories, some had happy endings.

I love short story collections, especially those that make you feel emotion. Some of the stories made me cry with grief, some made me smile and some had happy endings, but all were written beautifully by author Billy O'Callaghan and the magical descriptions of different places. I like stories that bring about different emotions in me and these 12 certainly did. Most ended with happy endings for the characters, some did not, but they all depicted stories of real life pain and happiness. Of course, I liked some more than others but I give this short story book 4 stars because of the beautiful writing and mostly because the different range of emotions I felt.

If it's hard for you to handle grief and heartache, this might not be for you, but it was certainly a book I liked very much and was able to handle, though there is much heartbreak in my own life.

A special thanks to Harper Collins Publishers and NetGalley for my ARC for my honest opinion.

It is a well-known fact that the Irish are supreme storytellers. Billy O'Callaghan lives up to this praise. I've often noted that a book of well written collection, featuring well crafted stories without a clinker in the bunch, is more taxing for a reader than a novel of similar length. Such is The Boatman. Twelve stories delving into the human heart, each of which demands attention and immersion, to be nipped at over a period of days and not devoured in one sitting. Can't be done. Each features a person sometimes at a crossroads which is a usual trope, but in many there is a look backward at a life that directed them there. The final sentence of "Wildflowers" sums this up: "He could tell himself, and believe, that he was who he'd always been, in one breath an old man, in the next still very much a boy, and he kept his losses close because time's barriers were soft." An old woman remembers a lost brother, a woman fleeing something unexplained in a hot, Spanish city, doomed lovers -- there is not a clichéd character in the mix. And the story from which the collection gets its title required for me a fistful of Kleenex. Highly recommended.

O' Callaghan offers us this stunning collection of a dozen stories which is meant to be slowly savored, not guzzled. You'll want to read this slowly without skimming and try to capture each sentence. That's the talent on display here - a talent for conveying even the tiniest of details, those details that give meaning to moments such as the smell of the earth, the hidden birthmark ("I know the chocolate thumbprint birthmark high up on the inside of her right thigh"), the sounds. The stories run the gamut of the human condition, ranging from the never ending loss a couple feels burying their child to the betrayal of a spouse to the little things that romance makes us think of to the thought of eternal abandonment on a lonely island off the Irish coast. "Everyone is marked in permanent ways, and those marks might make us ugly to some eyes but they don’t stop us from living."

Twelve stories that will take you to Paris, to Spain, Taipei, and, of course, to Ireland, as well as taking you back and forth through time, examining such themes as grief, love, fear, choice, loss, heartbreak, consequences, along with the wonders, as well as the sometimes unexpected brutalities, of life.

These days, it seems that less-than-happy news is almost constant, so this quote from the title story, The Boatman really spoke to me.

’As I age, I find myself favouring novels and stories that I know will end happily, not because that makes them more believable but because the very inverse of that is true, because their sense of reality softens and they again get to be something more than the world as it has shown itself to me. Not bad all the way to is core and rarely intentionally so, not without its beautiful moments, but neither naturally set up, it seems, for happy endings. Because in the end there’s always death, and always broken hearts. Happy stories, at least, get to hold the air of magic.’

And even though not all of these stories have happy endings, there’s so much beauty in the way that O’Callaghan shares them that, at least for me, they always hold that air of magic. A magic to soften the twists and turns of life, a beacon of light to remind us that we are not alone in our struggles and sorrows, that we are all small against the world.


Pub Date: 28 April 2020

Many thanks for the ARC provided by HarperCollinsPublishers / Harper Perrenial