then do park yourself right here and tell us about it, where I'm sure you'll have a captive audience.Book #1. Kala by Colin Walsh.
I borrowed both the printed book and audio book so I could toggle between the two depending on what I was doing - which was just as well as I found the story so gripping that it was hard to either put the book down or stop listening.
Audible summary:
In the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland's west coast, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They—Helen, Joe and Mush—were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group's white-hot center. Soon after that summer's peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.
Now it's fifteen years later: Helen has reluctantly returned to Ireland for her father's wedding; Joe is a world-famous musician, newly back in town; and Mush has never left, too scared to venture beyond the counter of his mother's café. But human remains have been discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing. And as past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala's disappearance, and to try to stop Kinlough's violent patterns repeating themselves once again...
Against the backdrop of a town suffocating on its own secrets, in a story that builds from a smoulder to a stunning climax, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.
Still in Ireland, I am now listening to #2 Time of the Child by Niall Williams and reading #3 The Coast Road by Alan Murrin which readers of nb.Magazine voted best new book of 2024.
Is a new relationship possible without sex?
