The Map of Tenderness [Paperback]

'The novel works on many levels. As an examination of the tangled skeins of family allegiance, it is clear-headed to the point of ruthlessness. In its dissection of a fatal illness, it is both rigorous and humane. But it is the power and subtlety of the writing which sets The Map of Tenderness apart ...With a few deft strokes, he can paint a picture of heart-stopping vividness' (Arminta Wallace, Irish Times )

'A dark and sensuous stylist ... He really is shaping up to be among the very best of the almost overabundant crop of Irish literary production during the last decade.' (Desmond Traynor, Irish Independent )

'Eloquent and haunting' (Doug Johnstone, List )

'Engages richly and rather profoundly with love, death and life.' (James Smart, Sunday Herald )

'A moving portrait of a family, of discovery, and having the courage to believe in other people.' (Anne-Marie Flanagan, Irish World )

'Moving [and] lyrical' (Sunday Independent )

"The Map of Tenderness is a captivating story...the author is an irish poet and it shows in his beautiful prose. It wraps you up as gently as a snowdrift."

(Michael Dobbs, author of Winston's War )

'Eloquent and haunting ... a writer with a natural feel for creating realistic atmospheres, and an innate knowledge of Irish sensibilities'

'Well-crafted ... The Map of Tenderness engages richly and rather profoundly with love, death and life.'

'A moving portrait of a family, of discovery, and having the courage to believe in other people.'

'[Wall] is a dark and sensuous stylist'

'Engages richly and rather profoundly with love, death and life.'

'Moving [and] lyrical'

'Eloquent and haunting'

Joe Lyons has never had much success with relationships until he meets Suzie, a young music teacher. Living a solitary existence as a writer, he's alienated his mother with his autobiographical first novel and has little to say to his stridently religious sister, Mary. Only his father keeps in regular touch. But now, in the warmth of this new love, the happy endings finally seem to outnumber the tragedies. So when news comes that his mother is seriously ill, he returns home, but what he finds there shocks him out of his complacency and Joe, like his father, comes to understand the true nature of love.

William Wall is an award winning poet and short story writer, and the author of several works of fiction for children, whose first adult novel, ALICE FALLING, was published by Sceptre in 2000. His work has appeared in The Irish Times, New Irish Writing and has been broadcast on radio on RTE. He is married with two children and lives in Co. Cork, Ireland.

A bright cloud hangs high in the stratosphere, catching the last light of evening long after darkness has fallen over the hemisphere. And down in the unpromising gloom of a Sunday second-hand market who knows what charm is at work, long after the objects found here have lost their original light, what powers of attraction and repulsion; the secret authority of order in the haphazard, the witchcraft of lines and lives crossed, love and friendship lying in ambush, fate passed from hand to hand like soiled coinage, as so often, among the usual people casually assembled. A space too cluttered with discards and mischance, blunders and wrong turnings and errors of calculation, the bygones of other lives – so many distractions and false trails I might almost have missed her.
An Irish Cabin Emerald Series Printed in Ireland. I turned the postcard over and studied the strangely tinted image. A cottage leaned into the side of a hill. Beyond the gable was a golden-headed field of corn and a hedge of escallonia. There was a speck high above – a bird?
Perhaps a hawk hanging upon its prey, a little too far away for the camera but caught in the act nonetheless.
Two women and two children posed around the doorway, the woman ’s petticoat an unnatural green. Where was the man of the house? Away in the fields? Or labouring in London? The photographer is the familiar outsider composing them, getting the angle right, the balance, controlling the exposure. Dear Mrs Delanty, we came to London on Friday and I am pleased to be among the bustling crowd again. I hope to see you shortly. Kind regards, Gregory. The corners were dog-eared, the date stamp indistinct.1907? I slotted it back in the rack. The cards were wrapped in cling film. I picked another at random, a full-breasted beauty in a lace-necked dress.
Miss Stella Gastelle. An invented name? An actress, a society belle or a whore? I turned it over and saw that the message was in code. Wvzi Qlv. I bought it, wondering why someone would want to encrypt a postcard. Another showed a cunning-looking grey-haired woman in a cloak, driving a donkey and cart. A basket behind her clearly held eggs. Going to Market. It was the kind of thing my mother liked. I moved on. The next stall sold second-hand kitchen utensils. I studied an ancient steel mincer, turned the handle and watched the rusting worm-gear wind its blades without moving, the illusion of progress in a spiral galaxy.
‘Not much call for kitchen mincers now,’ I joked. ‘Mad Cow disease et cetera.’
The stallholder nodded and smiled but I could see she hated me. ‘It’s a bargain,’ she told me. ‘Stainless steel.’
It was then that I looked up and saw Suzie.
In the jetsam of the afternoon she was marvellous as a seabird, glidenecked, shadow-light; a colour not in that day ’s gloomy palette. Her stall was selling Indian-style cotton prints, long dresses, caftans, blouses with elaborate designs, silk scarves in earth colours, Aran sweaters, tiny beaten bronze jewellery. I watched her from an aisle away where a man sold spare parts for motorboats. Five minutes to examine a white compass with a black dial on it, watch the sluggish card spin and never settle on the meridian.
Then I watched her from a place where a man tried to sell me an adjustable wrench, a set of spanners and a feeler-gauge in one lot at a knockdown price because he thought I needed them. She wore a jacket patchworked in autumn –beach-leaf, ochre, pale sky-blue, heather-purple.
She had brown eyes. I drifted towards her for almost an hour, uncertain of my course, unsure of my ground, borne on a tide of bargain hunters, stalling here and there where the channel shoaled between magazine racks and second-hand plastic flowers.
I browsed the bookstall longer than usual because it was next to hers. Forty-year old romantic novels in red cardboard covers. Old Readers’ Digest Condensed Books, National Geographics bound in packs of twelve and tied with brown string, Westerns with handsome heroes whose date was out. I touched the side of a stack and it haemorrhaged pink paperbacks. Mills & Boons, their cover pictures dominated by a single family of wistful heroines and strong blond heroes. I bought a Daily Mirror Yearbook for 1927.
I followed her to the soup stall, the smell of sweet fat and musty clothes and incense, a fat woman and a thin man talking to her. The thin man had a stall that sold televisions, video recorders and radios, all guaranteed to be in perfect mechanical order. When they left I stepped up to the counter and got soup too, ladled into a styrofoam cup. My hand trembled and I saw the excitement transformed to tiny concentric tidal waves, shrinking towards the centre, cancelling each other. I drank the soup to still the waves. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.