Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway (New Directions). This strange, ambitious novel is set in a version of Dublin where cars have been banned and people enter the country by teleportation. Bartholomew Port, an Irish writer living in London, returns to his homeland to participate in a literary festival, and arrives on the eve of a populist uprising. Dublin, he observes, has become a machine “for enriching the rich” and “impoverishing the poor,” a place where “life is not as important as money.” As Port falls in with a group of conspirators preparing for the insurrection, the book takes on a hallucinatory, digressive quality, blurring the lines between life and death, reality and illusion. Ultimately, Ridgway asks what responsibility bystanders must take for the injustices around them.
Queen Mab, by Emily McBride (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Madeleine is a “promising” twenty-three-year-old graduate student who decides, to the shock of other academic women in her life, to have a baby. (“They all say congrats, by the way, and better you than them,” one colleague says.) The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry. Is the baby really a baby, or has it been replaced by a changeling? Is Madeleine still herself, or has she been stolen away, too? Can her husband be trusted? The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.
