Her husband would have taken her along but she’s just not that type. A young couple are having a party and they attempt to butter up the elderly widow next door with chocolates and wine and the offer of headphones, which she refuses, before the event itself. This connected series of stories, set in the lower echelons of London society and around The Arms pub in Camberwell, finds characters trapped in lives they can’t escape from. Anyway, as O’Toole indicated, Ridgway is a writer of serious merit, so his first novel in several years is a welcome thing indeed. Nine years ago, no less an authority than well-respected fourth estate man Fintan O’Toole included Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child in his article, ‘Ten Things That Make Life Worth Living In 2012’, calling the author “a worthy inheritor” to “the modernist tradition in Irish Fiction” and quite correctly describing Ridgway’s first and second policemen book as “superbly written and compulsively readable.” As an aside, in the same article O’Toole managed to sum up the magic of a Patti Smith gig in a single paragraph, something it took your correspondent quite a bit more ink to do on these very pages, but I’m only young.
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