#BookReview ‘A Famished Heart’ by Nicola White

About the book…

‘Fabulous Dublin-based crime’
Jo Spain, bestselling author of The Confession
‘Intriguing, compelling and highly entertaining… formidably impressive’
Liz Nugent, award-winning author of Unravelling Oliver

‘A fabulous closed-room mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end’
Denise Mina, acclaimed author of Conviction

The Macnamara sisters hadn’t been seen for months before anyone noticed. It was Father Timoney who finally broke down the door, who saw what had become of them. Berenice was sitting in her armchair, surrounded by religious tracts. Rosaleen had crawled under her own bed, her face frozen in terror. Both had starved themselves to death.

Francesca Macnamara returns to Dublin after decades in the US, to find her family in ruins. Meanwhile, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are convinced that there is more to the deaths than suicide. Because what little evidence there is, shows that someone was watching the sisters die…

‘A Famished Heart’, the second Vincent Swan novel, is published by Viper Press, huge thanks to them for my gifted copy of this novel which is out now!

This book ia about a crime, but what that crime is and how it happened is secondary to the effects of it on the family,a close community and its religious representative.

Set in 1982, in Dublin, Rosa and Bernie McNamara are found dead-in different rooms,starved and emaciated ….in effect mummified. There is evidence that someone else was a witness-one of the bodies has a bar heater facing it-but who it was,and why is unfathomable.

Discovered by Father Timoney after the urgent raising of the alarm by their niece,Rosa and Bernie’s deaths bring their sister, back from New York. Her failed attempts at making a career on the stage can be swept aside by focussing on what happened to her sisters.

A disturbing and inexplicable choice,to starve themselves is tied to their deeply religious convictions. Whether this action took place because they wanted to transcend the physical form and attain enlightenment, or punish themselves is slowly investigated.

The characters of Maddy -the MacNamara’s niece-,Frances and Father Timoney are built up slowly,this is a book which rewards a slow and careful reader. It’s a carefilly constructed character study which takes apart families,religion and crime whilst conversely building flesh on the bones of the emaciated bodies.

The needle pulling all these threads together is Vincent Swan, the central character in Nicola White’s first novel,’The Rosary Garden’. He contrasts beautifully,in turn,with his partner Gina Considine as they examine how 2 people can be missing so long without anyone noticing.

The tragedy of ‘A Famished Heart is this, that 2 women who have no dependants, no relatives-thereby not providing as such a service to society-waste away in plain sight. Having been abandoned or choosing to self isolate from the real world,could it be that they aspire to immortality by releasing their souls from their physical cages? Or has a grave mistake come back to haunt them and this is their punishment?

All the little details in this book really insert themselves under your skin…it’s unsettling,unnerving and ultimately an immensely satisfying read.

As the first Viper title out of the gate,it sets a very high standard for the rest of their published works to follow

About the author…

Nicola White grew up in Ireland and New York and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. She lived in London and Belfast before moving to Glasgow to work as a contemporary art curator, moving on to produce arts documentaries for BBC radio and television.
In 2008 she won the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writer Award, and began to publish short stories in a range of journals, anthologies and for broadcast on Radio 4. In 2012 she was Leverhulme Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

Her novel, In the Rosary Garden, won the Dundee International Book prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 Deanston (now McIlvanny) Prize. It was selected as one of the four best debuts by Val McDermid ‘New Blood’ panel at the Harrogate crime festival and was one of the Glasgow Herald’s 2014 ‘books of the year’.

She publishes non-fiction with The Dublin Review and has contributed essays to numerous visual art publications, such as the National Galleries of Scotland’s 2014 ‘Generation Reader’.

Nicola currently splits her time between Glasgow and the Highlands, which means she lives mostly on the A9

Twitter @whiteheadnic @viperbooks