The Blackwater Lightship - Colm Toibin

Complex family relationships are portrayed in simple and moving prose by Toibin. Taking place in Ireland in the early 1990s, the book examines three generations in a family shaken by deaths. There is a lot going on in this book and yet it seems to flow smoothly with a gentle style of writing.

With a superb use of dialogue, we learn to see the human side of hardened people and understand complicated situations. Like most families, nothing is as simple at may first appear for the characters in this book. Six people are drawn together where they unravel much about themselves and intimate relationships.

Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the water shone in the early light and shocked her with its sullen beauty. It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love.