To Avenge a Dead Glacier

Winner of the RTÉ Francis McManus Short Story Prize, Shane Tivenan is a remarkable new talent, whose debut collection simmers with style, verve, tension and humor.

Throughout the stories in To Avenge a Dead Glacier, Tivenan explores the lives of Irish outsiders –characters living marginalized lives beyond the perimeters of their communities. For many of these characters, to integrate would mean changing in ways they cannot allow themselves to. In one story an Irish woman is committed to a mental asylum for attempting to assassinate the Italian dictator, Mussolini, shortly before the Italians shoot him themselves.

In another, a midlands graffiti artist, Dino Matcha, tries warning his townspeople through his throw-ups about the dangers of the way they are living, but neglects his own mind in the process.

In the title story, a man mourns the loss and destruction of nature, and spends his days down a grassed laneway waiting for passers-by who he can try and convert to his way of seeing the world.

A ninety-two-year-old woman suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome, and tries to celebrate her birthday in her nursing home in Elphin while fighting back the hallucinations brought on by her condition.

A Donegal woman is ostracized from her family, has spent twenty years living homeless on the streets of Madrid, and is unsure of what to do when she is giving the possibility of a new home and love.

​These are stories rich in the essential detail of human life, in the fraught exchanges that make up our every relationship, and very often of life lived beyond the confines of safety or simplicity.