Check Out The Book Of the Month
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This month we are launching our popular Book of the Month initiative again – each month multiples of the selected title will be available in every branch and the Online Reading group will discuss it at their Zoom meeting on the last Thursday of each month from 1-2pm. Registration for this is available through the LibrariesNI website. The books are also available online as eBook or audio through our free Libby and BorrowBox apps to help make them as accessible as possible.
We have tried to select a wide variety of popular titles to appeal to our readers across the board while at the same time perhaps offering the opportunity to try a new genre.
I have found that, as a reader, I really enjoy having the opportunity to talk about a book I have really loved or to discuss aspects that have perhaps jarred or puzzled me. A good 
discussion can be therapeutic and affirming – specially when others agree with me – but it can also spur me on to research more around a topic or to read something that others recommend.
Over the years I have belonged to a variety of groups and can honestly say I have learned and gained so much from attending them, as they have stretched my reading habits and informed me in a way that nothing else has, as well as connecting me to others who love reading as much as I do.
Heart be at Peace by Donal Ryan is this month’s selection and is the An Post Book of the Year from 2024 as well as being nominated for many other awards. It is a sequel to the authors first book The Spinning Heart although both can be read as standalones. The author uses 21 different characters – with each voice playing its part in
painting a picture of a town in rural Ireland. Chapter by chapter each character reveals a bit more of the story and history to add to the picture of themselves, their town, their connected past, their complicated relationships, and their struggle to survive in the economic fall out of the Celtic Tiger, while at the same time telling us about the story unfolding around the local drug scene culminating in a dramatic conclusion.
As you would expect the authentic and colourful vernacular is peppered throughout the narrative making it impossible to read in anything other than an Irish accent! It is a novel that makes the reader work to put together the individual jigsaw pieces as they are revealed and the lyrical language is the mark of Donal Ryan’s excellent prose and should be savoured and appreciated at leisure.
It is a carefully nuanced story bouncing between the present and the past and showing how different views can create such different narratives around the same thing, particularly between the male and female perspective.
Why not pick up the title and try it, then join us at the Online Reading Group? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
