Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Same as it ever was

The Colony by Audrey Magee

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Ireland, 1979. Painter Lloyd gingerly takes a dinghy to a remote island off the Irish Coast, where he can lock himself in with the natives and paint for the summer. The natives eye him with wariness; they are happy to take his money and, in exchange, feed him, but they mistrust his motives. Not long after, French linguist JP also arrives on the island. JP is writing a dissertation about the Irish language spoken on the island; a language which is on the decline as […]

A quiet, surprisingly intense emotional reading experience

The Colony by Audrey Magee

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Lloyd, an English artist, takes a boat (not the kind with a motor – a currach, which I had to look up because I was unfamiliar with traditional Irish boats) to a remote Irish island at the edge of Europe in 1979. The artist intends to paint a masterpiece there – all while being a huge pain in the ass to the island inhabitants, which are few in number but mighty in personality. There’s four generations of a family living on the island, but mostly […]

life on the edge, in more ways than one

The Colony by Audrey Magee

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CBR Bingo Square: New Another entry in my summer of Irish fiction, but also one of the two Irish novels that made it onto this year’s Booker Prize longlist! (It’s a fun longlist this year, too, with both the oldest and youngest nominees, and the shortest book ever nominated.) I’m still waiting on Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These from the library, but I was able to check out Aubrey Magee’s The Colony almost immediately. And, oof, what a good novel. The novel is set on a […]



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