Devorgilla Days, by Kathleen Hart. Landscape and life. The magic of nature; the magic of the world. Lobster fishermen and witches; wild swimming under a honey moon. A story about uncovering the things that really matter, and discovering what makes us feel alive. It is a story about finding that inner strength and resilience, and never giving up hope. There’s a cast of characters that weaves through this book; they ebb and flow to and from us, and you have a feeling that you might, just might, have met them before, just as the author herself, I feel, has a sense that some of these passers-by are known to her, somehow have been known, yet unknown.  Who was that figure that passed by just then? What was that out in the bay? And on they go. The writing style is a style that’s lean yet enough, nothing too over-the-top or purple in the form of prose; thought-provoking moments are presented to us clearly, somehow with emotion and yet cleverly spare so that there is a feeling of gratitude and elation which hold up the moments of exhaustion. One minute we are wondering just HOW she manages to push her body through the trials that hammer it, yet a minute later we are down by the sea, or even in the sea,  marvelling simply at the sense of being there. Scooping up and embracing life, there’s also honesty, comic often, as in the Affair of the Silent Lunch, which I read from here. You know, it’s been a while, more than a while, a long time, since a book has properly  transported my imagination to its location and into a sense of how the author is feeling. There are all sorts of reasons for this ‘fictionpause’ – perhaps partly to due to a pandemic whose belief-defying existence made fiction unreachable to me for a while. Devorgilla Days has brought back that sense of escape, a journey somewhere else to someone else and their life which isn’t so very far from one’s own existence. But this book is also funny: there’s the cleverest of balances between humour which sustains us, and the enormity of the world of which we are custodians. I’m reading from the chapter SWIM/BAT, which finds Kathleen swimming out into the bay at 11 o’clock at night…… HIGH TIDE 0.32 SUNRISE 04.55 SUNSET 22.11 17 HOURS 16 MINUTES OF SUN This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jothompson.substack.com/subscribe