Open Book Radio 4
Irish author Ruth Gilligan was a guest on Open Book, talking about her latest book, Nine Folds Make A Paper Swan.
Gilligan is young, bright, vivacious – some might call her precocious. She has packed an amazing amount into her life.
She had written three novels by the time she left university – Cambridge – and has the name of being the youngest writer in Ireland to ever reach the Irish best sellers list.
Her previous books were more commercial: “Love was there in a fluffy, bright, pink kind of way,” she told interviewer Mariella Frostrup.
But her latest book, Nine Folds Make A Paper Swan sounds a very different read.
It is a historical novel about a group of Jewish people on their way to the promised land of American in the 1901s, having fled the pogroms, who disembark from the boat at Cork, Ireland.
Did they hear someone shout “Cork” and think it was “New York”?
Who knows, but what follows spans a century and covers the integration of two communities and the agony of dreams crashed for families marooned on the Emerald Isle.
It moves forward to Shem, a mute Jewish man living in an Irish asylum in the 1950s and on to modern days where an Irish girl is in a relationship with a part-time magician in London. She’d marry him in a heartbeat if only his family did not insist the ceremony should be performed by a rabbi.
Gilligan confessed that she did “way too much research” for this novel – she was writing it as her PhD.
It is not just about romantic love but about familial love too and that can be a lot more complicated.
The result promises to be a good read. Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan is published by Atlantic.
