Richard and Judy column review

Richard and Judy column in Daily Express   "The Richard & Judy Summer Reads will be in bookshops in a few days,  novels designed to be the perfect choice for poolside, beach or airport.  Our selection panel have been burning the candle at both ends for weeks,  ploughing through hundreds of books to make sure the final list of eight titles is even stronger than last year’s.

I just wish there had been room for a ninth.  Because yesterday I finished Keeping it in the Family by Sinead Moriarty, and it is another corker of a tale from this Dublin-based novelist.  I met her a couple of years ago at a book convention in Galway and took her then-current book,  In My Sister’s Shoes, to read on the plane back to London.  I’d finished it by the time we landed,  in one greedy sitting,  and like all of us when we ‘discover’ a new writer, I’ve recommended her to my friends ever since.

Moriarty takes big universal themes such as childbirth,  cancer,  and, in her new one,  an unlikely relationship between Niamh, a ditzy blonde Irish newspaper columnist and Pierre, an older, intellectual university lecturer, and turns them into funny,  relevant and quirky stories.  Perhaps they are aimed rather more towards women readers than men, but I couldn’t care less - I get a huge kick out of them.

Like all her books,  Keeping it in the Family has rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists in Ireland - where she is widely compared to Marian Keyes - and it deserves to do the same here.  There are beautifully worked twists running through the story,  and I might as well give away the first because Moriarty herself does at the end of chapter one. 

If Pierre’s parents are sniffy about their accomplished son hooking up with a girl who writes a fluffy newspaper column,  Niamh’s go into orbit when their Catholic-born daughter announces she is going to marry a man who couldn’t be less Irish if he tried.

Because it’s not just that Pierre doesn’t come from the Emerald Isle.  It’s not just that his first language is French,  a result of his birth on Martinique.  It’s not even that that this makes him,  somehow unsettlingly to Niamh’s family,  Caribbean-French.

Pierre is black.

And,  dear reader,  we’re off.  

If you don’t enjoy Keeping it in the Family I will, to paraphrase Bart Simpson,  eat my summer shorts."  Richard Madeley