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Continue reading →: Island of the Blue Foxes by Stephen R. Bown
Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition Published 2017 This is the gripping telling of two voyages of Vitus Bering on his Russian expedition to the Aleutian Islands and Kamchatka on the early eighteenth century. It is an excellent addition to the literary canon of books on the…
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Continue reading →: Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro
Translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus- Published March 2025 This has a simple plot, a tale off the sea and a ship’s crew that by way of its telling, comes across as a sort of dark fairy tale. Strangeness abounds, and that aspect makes Navarro’s debut novel, both memorable…
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Continue reading →: RojaVery sadly, Roja did not improve. I made the difficult decision to return to our own vets, just for a final and second opinion, though I knew the outcome. At my first appointment in Letterkenny the vet told me that this may be the case. Though when lying on the…
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Continue reading →: Way Far Away by Evelio Rosero
translated from the Spanish (Colombia) by Victor Meadowcroft Published by New Directions in May 2024 An elderly man is searching for something, though we are not aware of what until almost half way through. His travels take him to a bizarre town shrouded in mist, where mice carcasses lie rotting…
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Continue reading →: The Burnt Orange Heresy by Charles Willeford
Published 1971 – American Literature I’m a big Willeford fan, and yet it was a surprise to me that as well as being a writer, he was a painter as well. Other than his Hoke Moseley novels, this may be the most famous of his other work, though that accolade…
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Continue reading →: Through Sligo into MayoWhile Arctic Scandinavia (where I was this time last year) bakes in 30 plus degrees here on the Mayo coast the weather has not changed for the last week, low cloud mixed with sea mist, a 15 to 20 mile per hour wind, and drizzly rain. Folk are taking evasive…
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Continue reading →: Weekend at MagheragallanThe place at Magheragallan beach in Gweedore Bay was ideal for the weekend. It was out of the wind, which was above 30 mph at times, and I don’t think it got less than 20. The area is a small peninsula just to the north of Derrybeg town where the…
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Continue reading →: West Donegal Atlantic CoastI finished that last post having just arrived at Portnablagh pier. Some of the beaches around the Donegal coast are not peaceful stopovers. It’s the height of the season and in the evening the families on the beaches give way to partying young adults and teenagers. Portnablagh was not such…
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Continue reading →: Trouble in LetterkennyI left Shap just after 6 am on Sunday morning, preferring the early start to the school holiday traffic of the previous day, and had an uninterrupted journey to Cairnryan of just about 3 hours. Without any immigration procedure check-in is extremely quick, how it used to be at the…
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Continue reading →: I Gave You Eyes And You Looked To The Darkness by Irene Solà
Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem In the upstairs bedroom of a remote house in the mountains of Catalonia an old woman named Bernadette, lies dying. Years before, an ancestor traded her soul for ‘an heir with a patch of land and roof over his head’. Bernadette hoped…
To live more widely
supera superiora sequi
SafeReturnDoubtful is my alias.
Where is Andy?
I was so much older then…
Quote of the Week
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’
Lewis Carroll
Safe Return Doubtful 