The light dies across the page of her book. She only likes to read in the daylight, the synthesized glow of her bedside lamp an intrusion on her imagination; the way it casts shadows from her fingers across her words a nuisance. It’s only four thirty, but already night is stealing in from wherever night Read More
I sit in the hidden café of Bonar Hall (as a four-year undergrad student I had no idea it existed) waiting for Sandra Ireland. I hold her book in my hands and wonder what she’ll be like. The book is macabre and unsettling, dead gerbils as hand puppets and warm mugs of coffee in an Read More
Sandra Ireland’s debut novel Beneath the Skin haunts you from the moment you first turn the opening pages. Echoes of former traumas are deeply embedded in the lives of fully realised, broken characters and ring in the reader’s ears from the first moments. In a time of clichéd explosions in soda adverts, or brutal, overt Read More
The audience at The Rep looked to be squirming as tens of children jumped, wiggled and waved, and agitated in their seats. Each one of them sits by a parent in a Santa hat, a caregiver with a face painted to look like an elf, or a grandparent with tinsel around their necks that leave Read More
