BOOK TALK: A winter mystery and a girlhood memoir

While out visiting friends the other night, I was asked which books were my favourites of 2024. So there I was, relaxed, eating and drinking – and completely stumped. Where is my mental list of favourite books ready to spout out at any opportunity?
I’m not really a list kind of person. I adore reading, and my love for certain books grows organically. As a bookseller, I am lucky enough to be able to say that books are my profession. Perhaps I should try making a list? So, on returning home, I did just that.
Most of the books I came up with have already featured in my fortnightly articles on these pages of The Mayo News – but not all.
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead’, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, is one I omitted – and it was definitely a favourite of 2024.
Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. She also won the Man Booker Prize for International Fiction that same year for her novel ‘Flights’. I’d figured she was a bit of a heavy weight and kept waiting to find my moment to seek out her books. I need not have feared.
‘Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead’ is about an eccentric character called Janina Duszejko who lives in a remote Polish village. The village is mostly comprised of summer homes, which she maintains in the winter. There are just two other permanent residents nearby. One of those residents is found dead by Duszejko and the other resident. Then some members of the local hunting club are also found dead under what could be suspicious circumstances.
Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. An animal lover, she tries to convince the police that the dead hunters were killed by the animals they pursued. She lives an isolated life in the village, and we as readers are privy to her inner thoughts. We wonder at her madness and her sense of injustice, which encompasses the treatment of animals, and she defends those marginalised in society.
The story is dark – even the setting is dark, being mid-winter – but it is funny, so funny. I love the opening line: “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the night”. I was gifted a copy of Tokarczuk’s latest book, ‘The Empusiam: A health resort horror story’, by another bookseller friend and can’t wait to read it.
When heading into the year, I often think of the authors whose work we carry in the shop but I have never got round to reading. I love science fiction but don’t get to read it very often. I love to read classics I have never read before. However, I am extremely lucky to read the latest releases from many genres although fiction is obviously my favourite.
So the first author on my to-read list for 2025 was bell hooks (always in lower case). Her books are best sellers in the bookshop, but I have never got round to reading her many non-fiction works. I was delighted then when the first box of books that arrived in the shop in January contained ‘Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood’, just republished by Dialogue Books.
And what a stunning book it is. An American author, theorist, educator and social critic known for her work on feminism and race, bell hooks (whose real name was Gloria Jean Watkins) passed away in 2021. This memoir was first published in the US in 1996, but it was only published in the UK and Ireland for the first time just last September.
The author tells her story of growing up in a working-class African-American family living in a small segregated town in Kentucky. The short chapters say so much with so few words – how she saw the world as a child, how race was something she didn’t understand, how different she felt, how she pushed against the ways of doing things and felt alone and isolated because of this. She talks about her ancestral past and the things that white people didn’t understand, and how the connection between that past and slavery was still very much alive in her parents and grandparents.
We see how she didn’t understand the ways of men and the subjugation of women, and the way she saw the effects of alcohol on some in her community. She shows such keen powers observation and wisdom from an early age (“We are not able to punish grown-ups for their lies”), and her use of words and language is beautiful and poetic (“his voice wrinkled like paper”).
I’m looking forward finding more favourites to share with you this year – I might even try to keep a list this time!

•  Bríd Conroy and her husband, Neil Paul, run Tertulia bookshop at The Quay, Westport.