In her last novel, The Pull of the Stars, Donoghue – who was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2010 for Room – presciently considered the impact of the 1918 flu pandemic, and this latest was a lockdown project, albeit planned pre-Covid. Though this is a text replete with religious fable, it’s in descriptions of the physical world that the prose soars As for Trian, along with copying out psalters, he has the task of keeping the brethren in fish and fowl, and he finds himself more and more appalled by how easy it is to plunder the island’s innocent wildlife, flightless auks included.

Cormac, on the other hand, is all about practical matters, sowing seeds in the scant inch of soil the island offers and using stories to ease tensions. Artt’s insistence that “God will provide” sounds ever more delusional. Inevitably, tensions surface between the far from equal trio once their “sacred wandering” ends and they reach Skellig Michael. He has the scars to prove it, some more visible than others: part of his skull has been lost to a battle injury, and the plague claimed his wife and all three of their young children.ĭespite close shaves with catapult-firing slavers and nights ragged with the howling of wolves, this is a character-driven narrative. Cormac, meanwhile, is a late convert to Christianity and old enough to have lived an entire other life before entering holy orders. He’s a ciotóg – a left-hander – and profoundly awkward with it, but he carries about him a deeper mystery that will be disclosed only as the novel nears its wave-lashed denouement.

Gangly, red-haired Trian is a young piper whose family gave him to the monastery when he was 13. Brother Artt, as he’s named, is revealed to be insufferably sanctimonious, but his mismatched travelling companions are complicated, appealing creations.

Emma donoghue haven reviews