Colin Walsh, Kala

“What is about Ireland that allows it to churn out author after author with novels that can stand a reader on their head? These authors can take the dullest tropes, stories written over and over again, year in and year out, and make them new again and Kala is a great example. Three friends, half of six that met each other one summer and became best buddies, meet again for the first time in fifteen years. Each is in town for different reasons when bones are discovered at a construction site and determined to be those of one of the six who disappeared that long ago summer. Now secrets bubble forth and each of the three have to come to terms with what happened that summer. What sets this above the usual cliché is the fully rendered characters, each with their own faults, each with their own memories of that fateful summer that don’t jive with one another. Then there’s the setting itself, a middle class resort town on the coast that becomes a character all its own. So atmospheric, the tension rising page by page, Kala breathes new life into the old and beaten down.” — Pete Mock