We three librarians who have read this are so excited to finally discover someone whose writing approximates the fine Niall Williams and his Irish tales. Garrett Carr is from Killybegs, a fishing town in Donegal, Ireland’s northwest coast. He now lives in Belfast and teaches Creative Writing in the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University Belfast. A book to renjoy…. so slowly.

“The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr captures the changing feeling of the latter decades of the twentieth century in Ireland better than any other recent novel I could name. Its language and sensibility reflects the sly humour of its Donegal setting, and the reader is riveted by the heroic efforts of its characters to hold on to one another in the face of the gale-force winds of historical change.”—Niamh Mulvey, author of The Amendments 

“The novel does something only art can, which is to show how more than one truth might be held in mind at once, even if together they conflict… Wry, observant, various and thoughtful, a book that gathers momentum like a westerly, the crash of consequences giving way to a late calm, the reader left with a stunned impression of the storm that just blew over.”—The Irish Times 

“Carr’s novel accesses deep strands of truth by embedding magic in the real… In the difficulty of these characters’ lives is a sense of real connection that gives the book a kind of lightness, of what might be possible in a real community: lasting ties, genuine reciprocity. This is not false hope; it’s just hope… This is a surprising, tender and warm-hearted novel about a real place and real people.”—The Guardian

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