The Watch House - Readings

Description

In the vein of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, THE WATCH HOUSE by Bernie McGill is the story of the modern world arriving on Rathlin, a remote Irish island, at the very end of the nineteenth century, with dramatic consequences for a young woman named Nuala.As the twentieth century dawns on the island of Rathlin, a place ravaged by storms and haunted by past tragedies, Nuala Byrne is faced with a difficult decision. Abandoned by her family for the new world, she receives a proposal from the island's aging tailor. For the price of a roof over her head, she accepts.Meanwhile the island is alive with gossip about the strangers who have arrived from the mainland, armed with mysterious equipment which can reportedly steal a person's words and transmit them through thin air. When Nuala is sent to cook for these men - engineers, who have been sent to Rathlin by Marconi to conduct experiments in the use of wireless telegraphy - she encounters an Italian named Gabriel, who offers her the chance to equip herself with new skills and knowledge. As her friendship with Gabriel opens up horizons beyond the rocky and treacherous cliffs of her island home, Nuala begins to realise that her deal with the tailor was a bargain she should never have struck.

About the Author

Bernie McGilllives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland. She is the author of two novels:The Butterfly CabinetandThe Watch House, which was shortlisted in 2019 for the Irish/European Union Prize for Literature. Her work has been translated into Dutch (Charlotte’s vleugels) and into Italian (La donna che collezionava farfalleandLe parole nell’aria).Her latest publication isThis Train is For, a collection of short stories published by No Alibis Press, Belfast (June 2022).Sleepwalkers, Bernie's first collection of short stories, was published in May 2013 byWhittrick Pressand shortlisted for theEdge Hill Short Story Prize 2014. The title story was first prizewinner in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest (US) and the collection includes 'Home', a supplementary prizewinner in the 2010Bridport Short Story Prizeand 'No Angel', Second Prizewinner in the Seán Ó Faoláin and the Michael McLaverty Short Story Prizes. Her work has been anthologised inBelfast Stories,Reading the Futureand in the award-winningThe Long Gaze Back,The Glass Shore, and inFemale Lines. She is the recipient of a number of Arts Council Awards as well as a Research Award from theSociety of Authors.She is a former Writing Fellow with theRoyal Literary Fundat theSeamus Heaney Centreat Queen's University, Belfast.Reviews‘McGill writes about life, love and telegraphy with a poet’s clarity’Sunday Times‘Totally absorbing and full of unexpected twists’Sunday Business Post‘A lyrical, wonderfully atmospheric novel’Sunday Express‘McGill proves once again she is a masterful storyteller . . . historical fiction at its absolute best’The Lady‘The Watch House, set on Rathlin Island at the turn of the 20th century, [is] awash in old rituals and impending transformations, in loyalties and enmities and all manner of local witchery.’ Patricia Craig in theIrish TimesBooks of the Year.‘Hard to put down, this atmospheric book will stay with you long after the final heart-rending denouement, setting McGill firmly into the panoply of modern Irish writers’Irish Independent'McGill has the ability to enter into the brain and heart of her characters.' (Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey writing inThe Guardian

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