There was a lyrical ferocity in Paul Lynch's first novel, Red Sky in Morning, which transformed the Irish landscape from a tightly knit, rural place into a vastly expanded terrain with no defined horizons. A big cinematic language had been created that seemed to release the narrative from any historical restraint or idiomatic familiarity. Even a hanging, deftly signalled by a single word, "rope", seemed to push the central action inevitably towards the North American continent.
In his new novel, The Black Snow, that infinite distance comes spilling back in reverse with the return of an Irish emigrant to his native home in 1945. After years spent working on construction in New York, Barnabas Kane settles on a prosperous farm in Donegal, with his American wife, Escra, and their teenage son, Billy.
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