Patricia Craig has some important points to make, and makes them with cogency and wit. Always readable and entertaining (and sometimes controversial), she is possibly the only female non-academic Northern Irish critic who has consistently, and over a long period, contributed to every leading UK and Irish publication (and a couple in the US).

The book begins with the unpublished and partly autobiographical “Kilclief”, which deals mainly with the literary associations – unexpectedly extensive –  of a small but distinctive area of Co Down. Next comes a section on books relating to Ireland, “Red Hands and Dancing Feet”. Here you will find insightful essays on some of the great names in Irish literature (Synge, James Stephens, Brendan Behan), alongside others featuring more recent authors (Elizabeth Bowen,  William Trevor, Ciaran Carson). Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s exhilarating Cré na Cille is discussed, and another long piece concerns the music-and-song collector Seamus Ennis.

Part Two, “Pious Girls and Swearing Fathers”, presents views and reviews of books connected (loosely) to women and children, and contains lively pieces on Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Harry Potter and so on. And the third section, “Fiddlesticks!”, rounds up some stray, but superlative, miscellaneous articles on subjects as diverse as the enigmatic MI5 officer Maxwell Knight and Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks.

Kilclief & Other Essays is an altogether memorable collection.

This book has been generously supported by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

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“Patricia Craig is not only Ireland’s greatest reader, she is also … line by line, page by page, one of its finest, wittiest writers.”
Glenn Patterson, novelist

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“Patricia Craig is one of our culture’s real stars. I have admired for years the depth and range of her thinking and writing. Even so, I have been pleasantly taken aback by the sheer magnitude of her achievement, now honoured and celebrated by the very handsome production of Kilclief & Other Essays. For anyone interested in Ireland this will be essential reading – and for decades to come. At once critic and creator, Patricia Craig is what Jorge Luis Borges calls ‘a complete reader’; and ‘complete readers’, he suggests, are even rarer than good writers.”
Michael Longely, poet

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