All Summer. Claire Kilroy. Faber and Faber. UK 10.99 PB

(Irish Independent)

reviewed by Pat Boran

A stolen painting, an abusive, drug-using lover with a tendency towards violence, and a frightened woman whose memory is not so much lost as hopelessly scrambled deciding to go on the run. These are the main ingredients of 28-year-old Dubliner Claire Kilroy's first novel, though it is a far more impressive debut than this fairly standard thriller outline might suggest.

From the opening pages when a young female stranger appears out of nowhere on a windswept island off the west coast, and the local priest remarks, 'That's an interesting scar you've got under your eye,' Kilroy keeps the pressure on, forcing the reader to wonder about the version of events being related while hardly giving a moment's respite from them.

Her prose does a lot of the work. Short chapters made up of clipped sentences and almost percussive dialogue give the narrative an added sense of urgency, edge, danger. Though a little too conveniently named, Anna Hunt is convincingly both quarry and prey as she tries to clarify her confused memories while keeping a nervous lookout for the reappearance of the abusive Kel, her partner in the art theft.

Girl in the Mirror, the stolen painting's title, again like the character's name, seems perhaps too convenient, and casts something of a Freudian B-movie shadow over a book which, thriller though it most certainly is, has at least as much to offer as a psychological portrait of a mind under strain, of the tensions that exist between art's sometimes ideal and the all-too-real world.

© copyright Pat Boran