The Story Collector
Christmas 2010. American artist Sarah isn’t coping well with unresolved grief and a failed marriage. On impulse, instead of flying home to her family in Boston, she catches a plane to Ireland and winds up staying in a remote cottage and stumbling across a hidden diary. But perhaps she is exactly where she is meant to be?
Christmas 1910. Irish farmer’s daughter Anna jumps at the chance to introduce enthusiastic American scholar Harold to local people, in his quest to translate and record local stories about The Good People – fairies that may be benign or malignant and might be the souls of the dead. But Anna too has a secret story to tell and her interactions with the sinister but attractive Anglo-Irish Hawley twins of Thornwood House threaten to end in tragedy.
This is an engaging story about unsettled grief – not only the two heroines, but also Oran, the single father Sarah befriends, and his mercurial teenage daughter Hazel are suffering different forms of bereavement. The characters, particularly in the modern section of the novel, are well-developed, and elements of Irish history are lightly sketched in. The choice of historical time setting seems apt too, before the First World War marked the beginning of a more modern age. The possibility that magic and the fairies are real is dangled tantalisingly before the reader, but not in a way that might make a sceptic roll their eyes.
If I have a criticism it is that sometimes Anna’s diary, with its measured prose and meticulous adherence to chronology, reads more like an account written several years after the events it describes and lacks the rawness of unprocessed emotion poured instantly onto the page. But all in all, this is a fitting tribute to Irish folklore that might otherwise be forgotten.
