Why a Booktrail?
A frightened young girl knocks at your door. Would you answer? Should you?
Nothing on Earth
What you need to know before your trail
A frightened girl bangs on a door. A man answers. From the moment he invites her in, his world will never be the same again.
She tells him about her family, and their strange life in the show home of an abandoned housing estate. The long, blistering days spent sunbathing; the airless nights filled with inexplicable noises; the words that appear on the windows, written in dust.
Where is her family now? Is she telling the truth? Can the man be trusted?
Travel Guide
The landscape of the story
Nothing on Earth (c) Cathy746books
The landscape of the story is raw and remote as well as vague. A priest living in a ghost town of sorts, and as Cathy 746 books says “The heat wave is freakish, creating an atmosphere of heavy menace, the rising dust and empty houses inhabiting a sense of apocalyptic dread.” There is no location as such but Newry is where the author was born so a good place to visit to see his Ireland!
“The shops were desolate. Even the minimart, usually stocked with tat for passing traffic, felt empty. Paul bought a net of satsumas and a Sharpie of royal washable blue for the girl, but there was no one to pay….There was footpath for half a mile of road from the edge of town and none for the second half-mile after the supermarket. They stepped into long grass and briars whenever they heard a car coming. Twice they made way, and twice nothing came.”
“There are moments when the empty space of a room takes on the shape of one who must have stood there and who perhaps should still be there. In those moments, that space is like a cavity, an entrance even. It hangs heavy with absence. Its translucence collects, magnifies. Everything the other side of it appears minutely out of proportion with everything else outside its frame. It acquires a quality. There is no other word for it. The quality the empty space acquires is that of a lake’s surface or of some lead-based mirror glass.”
Booktrailer Review
Nothing on Earth by Conor O’Callaghan is a heat haze of a novel – shimmering and elusive, impossible to pin down with an allure that is as beautiful as it is disturbing.
It is also a difficult book to review. For a novel in which little is revealed, it is hard to talk about without spoiling the experience for a new reader. It also defies categorization. It is a poetic horror story. A gothic tale set in the blazing sunshine of a summer on an Irish ghost estate. It is a confession, but may also be a defense. It does not give easy answers so will not be to everyone’s taste, but I found it to be a beguiling, poetic and atmospheric book, unlike anything I have read in recent years.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Nothing On Earth
Author/Guide: Conor O’Callaghan Destination: Ireland Departure Time: 2000s
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