Nothing on earth /
O'Callaghan, Conor,1968-
London : Doubleday Ireland,
2016
A frightened girl bangs on a door. A man answers. It is the hottest summer in living memory, in a country that sounds like Ireland: post-boom, in ruins, depopulated. The girl has words scrawled in blue on her burned flesh. The girl stays with the man. She tells him about her mother, her mother's identical twin, her father, and their strange shared life in the show house of an unfinished development on the outskirts of a desolate town. Nothing on Earth is a true mystery. What does the town remember about the twins? Where has everybody gone? When nobody remains to tell the story of the girl's family, the man repeats it to a world that doubts his every word. Beautiful and terrifying, his disturbing testimony reaches toward those frayed edges of reality where each of us - if only once - glimpses something nobody will ever explain.
Actually published in Dublin, Ireland.
A frightened girl bangs on a door. A man answers. It is the hottest summer in living memory, in a country that sounds like Ireland: post-boom, in ruins, depopulated. The girl has words scrawled in blue on her burned flesh. The girl stays with the man. She tells him about her mother, her mother's identical twin, her father, and their strange shared life in the show house of an unfinished development on the outskirts of a desolate town. Nothing on Earth is a true mystery. What does the town remember about the twins? Where has everybody gone? When nobody remains to tell the story of the girl's family, the man repeats it to a world that doubts his every word. Beautiful and terrifying, his disturbing testimony reaches toward those frayed edges of reality where each of us - if only once - glimpses something nobody will ever explain.
Storytelling
Storytelling.