A vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sev, youth and age. Big ideas tread lightly through Audrey Magee's strong prose.' Sarah Moss Shortly after the artist's arrival, a second visitor, one who has come each summer for 5 years, steps off the boat. He is a French linguist who has been studying the incursion of English into the speaking habits of the locals, for most of whom Gaelic (Irish) is their first language. His goal is to publish a book that will earn him fame, and a doctorate. As the story gradually emerges from Magee’s deftly written prose that weaves conversations with interior worlds, I feel it would spoil the delight of reading this novel if I were to give the story outline. Instead, a few words about the themes and style, as these are as impressive as the story itself, multi-layered, inventively written and emotionally moving. Devastating.

The Colony is based on a tiny Irish Island where Irish is still, almost exclusively, spoken. It’s the summer of 1969, and an English artist, Mr Lloyd, is setting out there to spend the summer in splendid isolation, in the hope of finding renewed artistic inspiration. He’s dismayed when, just days later, Masson, a French linguist arrives on his annual visit, writing on the preservation of the Irish language. The two men clash — and, literally, fight over the turf.The colony. This word receives several meanings and shades in the novel, and the island with its inhabitants is the place which can be appreciated if not fully comprehended only by those who want to bond themselves with it. The artist who arrives at the island expects to exploit it for his own ends and leaves after achieving them and destroying hopes of some of the inhabitants. Those islanders who resist him, win.

The danger with books like this is that the grand political themes can end up stifling the human element or sapping the life out of the characters. Thankfully, for the most part, Audrey Magee does a wonderful job of conveying her characters with empathy and authenticity. The nagging cynicism I felt at first (that this was going to be a giant piece of pontificating Booker-prize-bait) eventually faded away. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The novel is interspersed with brief, devastating bulletins describing the real-life killings that took place in Northern Ireland in 1979. How important are they to the novel as a whole and what made you write those passages in a journalistic, present-tense way? I am a bit torn as to whether this is a 4 star or a 5 star book. It definitely has all the hallmarks of 5 stars, but the ending frustrated me a bit. It's definitely not tied up with a bow, and the reader is never spoon fed. And I normally love that . . .but in this case, I was so invested in the characters that I felt a bit like I was watching this incredible drama, and the season ended. And I can't wait to be united next season with the characters, and then the show was cancelled. There's just so many directions the book could go that I almost can't stand not knowing what the author was thinking . . . I will volunteer to place myself in the literary time-out corner until I can sort myself out and get prepared to face disgrace should this win the Booker ;)JP, initially confident of his welcome on the Island and in love with language, starts both fluent, wordy and heavily figurative – before over time moving into both a more academic and more suspicious register as the Islanders make it clear he is as guilty of appropriation as Lloyd. stars, rounded up. I'd be extremely surprised if this didn't make the 2022 Booker longlist, and maybe even the shortlist. It is the summer of 1979. An English painter travels to a small island off the west coast of Ireland. Mr. Lloyd takes the last leg by curragh, though boats with engines are available and he doesn't much like the sea. But he wants the authentic experience, to be changed by this place, to let its quiet and light fill him, give him room to create.

Inspired . . . Magee strikes an expert balance of imagination and lucidity . . . [The Colony] proves that the path to understanding is a meaningful one. And watching as the men unload the fragile canvas currach and lift it out of the water to store it safe from the fierce waves. and the bilingual James (or Séamus, his Irish name, which Masson insists on using despite his request not to do so), who dreams of another life in London: Beyond these narrative pleasures and deft character studies, it's also a subtle allegory of the deep cultural scars left by British colonialism, and the illusory binary of tradition and modernity. Magee slowly ratchets up the tension and menace, interspersing narrative chapters of island-based events with terse journalistic accounts of the escalating death toll of sectarian conflict, whose waves ultimately lap up against the island's shores by the novel's end.Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.