This September, we saw some extraordinary new titles published, both from debut authors and titles from household names who have spent a long time returning to the book shelves. Dymphna has picked the best of the best for Dymphna’s September Book Club and we give a special nod to ‘A Letter Home’ which is definitely one for a Christmas gift, a coffee table staple, or just to lose yourself in the pages of history- the stories of the people we would otherwise have forgotten.
They Say a Girl Died Here by Sarah Pinborough
Anna Maybourne has moved back to the small farming town of Harper’s Creek with her mother, younger sister and grandmother, partly because her grandmother’s dementia is getting worse.
Anna is already carrying her own trauma after leaving university. Then she becomes fascinated by the murders of two local girls, which happened three years apart and were blamed on the so-called Farmhandman. As the anniversary of the murders approaches, Anna begins to suspect that the story the town has told itself about those killings may not be the whole story.
This is Sarah Pinborough doing what she does particularly well: making you question what you think you know. The real hook isn’t simply who killed the girls? It’s who gets to tell the story of what happened?
There is also a strong theme of unreliable memory running through the book. Anna is dealing with her own fractured memories, while her grandmother’s dementia means that memory itself is becoming slippery within the family.
And then there’s the town. Harper’s Creek has essentially created its own mythology around the murders. Pinborough plays with that idea of communities deciding what is truth, what is gossip and what is easier to believe.
This is a thriller about murder, but underneath that it’s really about memory, trauma and the dangerous stories we tell ourselves when the truth is too uncomfortable.
A cracking page-turning from the author who gave us ‘Behind Her Eyes,’ this is a welcome return to a genre that suits her well.
Hollywood, Ending by John Green
He is back!…returning to fiction after nearly a decade and moving into adult fiction. (many will remember John Green from The Fault in Our Stars, THAT tear-jerker!)
Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo are two young actors cast in a film about Andy Warhol. Juniper is trying to move beyond her history as a child star, while Kai is stepping into his first major acting role. They become attracted to each other, but their relationship develops in an environment where literally everything can become public property.
The film’s success changes their lives, and suddenly their private experiences, their trauma and their relationship are being consumed by the attention economy.
The cleverness here is that Green isn’t really writing about Hollywood alone. He’s writing about being watched.
Celebrity culture and social media have blurred the distinction between having a life and having a version of your life that other people consume.
And the Andy Warhol element is perfect because Warhol understood celebrity, image and fame long before Instagram existed.
There’s also a lovely contrast between the public story and the private one. On screen, Kai and Juniper are characters. Off screen, they’re two young people trying to work out who they are.
John Green takes Hollywood and turns it into a bigger question: how much of ourselves are we willing to give away when everybody else wants to watch?
A Letter Home by Kerby A. Miller and Breandán MacSuibhne
This is a beautiful collection of more than sixty letters written by Irish emigrants to North America, stretching from the early 1800s through to the mid-1900s. The letters come from the Imirce collection at the University of Galway.
And that’s what makes it so powerful: these aren’t historians telling us what emigration was like. These are the emigrants themselves telling us.
Some of the letters feature Waterford people who made the journey overseas, leaving loved ones, home soil, and hoping for so much.
These are voices on the page who remind us that once upon a time, a letter was a long-awaited connection with a loved one. These are long before the days of email, phonecalls, social media or any instant communication method. A letter home meant your loved one was still alive and their words made the journey home.
A letter home is such a simple thing, but it carries enormous weight. Someone leaves Ireland, crosses an ocean, and the only way they can reach the people they love is through words on a page.
And suddenly history becomes incredibly personal.
You can imagine someone in Waterford, Cork, Galway or Donegal receiving one of these letters and sitting down to read it. The big historical story of Irish emigration becomes one person saying, essentially: “This is what happened to me. This is what I need you to know.”
History can sometimes feel very distant, but give me a letter written by an emigrant missing home and suddenly 150 years disappears.
Gruffalo Granny by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
And then we go from Irish emigrants and Hollywood and serial killers… …to the Gruffalo’s granny!
The Gruffalo tells his daughter that her Gruffalo Granny is coming to stay, bringing us back into the Deep Dark Wood for the first new Gruffalo story in more than 20 years.
It’s Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler returning to the world they created more than two decades ago, with the familiar rhyme, humour and characters, but introducing another generation of the Gruffalo family.
Because Gruffalo Granny is about inheritance.
The stories we tell children become part of their childhood. Then they become adults who read those same stories to their own children.
The Gruffalo has become something much bigger than one picture book. It’s a shared cultural memory. And now Granny is being added to that family story.
It’s also a lovely reminder that books aren’t just about the stories inside them. They’re about the people we share them with.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for another wonderful month of reading at Dymphna’s Book Club.
All titles as part of Dymphna’s Book Club are available from The Book Centre, Waterford. Tell them we sent you!
