Seán Farrell & Quynh Tran

The star of Seán Farrell’s Frogs For Watchdogs is a young boy, a wild child with a ferocious imagination who will stop at nothing to protect his family. After years of moving from place to place, a young family finds shelter in an isolated house in the Irish countryside. Their father is missing, Mum is a healer and B a formidable big sister. In his strange new territory, a wild little boy gives voice to his experience. Jerry Drain, a local famer, is stealing hay from the barn, someone is making nasty phone calls to the house at night and darkness is gathering at the edges of their lives. With his ferocious imagination the boy will do everything in his power to protect his family. But Jerry will not go away and Mum seems to be falling under his spell. It will be a year of major wins and baffling defeats for the boy, as Jerry’s true nature insists on revealing itself.

‘Thoroughly original and devastating… this book felled me.’ Una Mannion

‘Seán Farrell is a magical writer.’ John Banville

Má dreams of wealth and grandeur, Hieu dreams of Finnish girls. Quynh Tran’s novel Shade and Breeze is written from the perspective of the younger brother who is always on the periphery, always an observer, as he gradually disappears into his schoolwork, mesmerised by his own intellect. The three of them form a solitary world in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland. Má and Hieu, constantly on a collision course with each other and the community’s suffocating social codes. They live among people who want to talk openly about everything, who don’t understand the necessity of sometimes remaining in the shade. In sensitive and transfixing prose that has the effect of a series of tableaux, and with chapter headings reminiscent of the intertitles in a silent film, Quynh’s multi-award-winning debut is a moving story about love, the compulsion to create, and the meaning of family.

‘A magic voice. Working with the coming-of-age in a smalltown narrative Quynh Tran creates a world completely of its own kind, a story of belonging and estrangement, and of the refugee experience. In a sensual, dreamy prose, still so very real, Tran has written a first novel that shines like a precious gem.’ Monika Fagerholm, author of Who Killed Bambi?

Quynh Tran’s attendance at West Cork Literary Festival is supported by the Swedish Arts Council in collaboration with the Embassy of Sweden, UK as part of their Stories From Sweden programme