A New Day Dawning

A New Day Dawning is a new book by Edward Forde Hickey.

The book follows a group of children in the part of Ireland that is Tipperary and a hillside community therein.

The novel follows a group of children through their early lives as they learn the ways of life in Rural Ireland during the 1940s as their grip on who they are and their unique, individual personalities grow and develop.

Hickey knows the area depicted well, as he was born in Dolla, Tipperary. Where he still has a small hillside farm, together with a home in Kent shared with his wife and three children.

The setting of the book is, says Hickey: "the unreal world of Rookery Rally."

The format of the book is interesting as it eschews ordinary chapters for a series of vignettes of varying lengths, each of which relate to different events in a particular month of a particular year as the book continues from September 1945 and the cessation of the distant war right through to late September 1946.

We follow the children as they learn right from wrong, sometimes with horrible consequences, they learn to say their Rosaries ("inspired by the bespectacled Pope" in a message sent all the way from Rome.

They learn that killing is wrong and that some adults are not as nice as some other adults, and that's putting it very mildly as some of the adults in the area are, to put it mildly, not very nice at all.

Slipperslapper, for example is one of the most horrific characters that I have ever come across.

The book is published by Matador at £10.99 and is available from the That's Books and Entertainment bookshop, just to the right of this review.