#BookReview of #WritersAnonymous by William Wall | @NewIslandBooks |

‘In the summer of 1980, a lonely boy is found murdered in the graveyard of his quiet fishing town. Forty years later, a writer finds himself forced to confront the one story he’s refused all his life to tell.‘
– Writers Anonymous

[ About Writers Anonymous ]

Fighting off the boredom of lockdown, acclaimed author Jim Winter decides to share his skills by setting up an anonymous online writing workshop – but his generosity will cost him more than he knows.

Right away, the work of a talented student known only as Deirdre stands out. Her novel concerns the death of Mattie Lantry, a lonely seventeen-year-old found murdered in the now-distant summer of 1980, in the local cemetery of his quiet fishing town. The writing is brilliant, but there’s one problem: Jim grew up with Mattie, and Deirdre knows things that only he and his schoolfriends should know. Chapter by chapter, she’s revealing a story that he’s worked all his life to repress.

Who is Deirdre, and what will her novel uncover? To find out, Jim must return to the town he fled all those years ago. As his buried past and perfect present collide, the stories he’s told about his own nature – to his reading public, to his loved ones and to himself – begin to fall apart.

[ My Review ]

Writers Anonymous by Irish novelist, poet and short story writer William Wall published April 4th with New Island Books and is described as a ‘gripping story of a forgotten murder, a buried truth, and a voice from the past that demands to be heard.’

Set in Cork during the recent Covid Pandemic, Jim Winter, a writer, is frustrated, and housebound, due to the travel restrictions. Living with his wife, Catherine, they have insightful and fruitful conversations but he is looking for something more to distract him from the mundanity of this enforced lifestyle. On a whim he decides to advertise his services as a mentor for a small group of unpublished writers, with one proviso, everyone, including himself, would remain anonymous. Submissions arrive in, more than he expected, so Catherine and himself eventually whittle it down to five.

“The idea came to me in the vacant space between one irrational thought and another. The place where ideas for books come from. Normally I see phrases, sentences, or the shapes of characters emerge from that primitive darkness to assume an earthly shape on the page. But this time it is a practical thought that will – or should – have consequences in the real world. An online writers’ group.” – William Wall

The intention was that these five writers would submit pieces of their work to him and, over Zoom meetings, with cameras off, they would critique and discuss their ideas together. The deal was a six month mentorship, by which time life would hopefully be back to normal. When Deirdre, one of the final five, submits additional pages of her proposed novel, Jim is taken aback. Her story is set in 1980 in Rally, a small town in West Cork (that quietly resembles Schull for any readers familiar with West Cork). It recounts the tragic story of a young seventeen year old boy, Mattie Lantry, who was discovered dead in a local graveyard following the Leaving Cert result celebrations. Jim Winters knows Mattie Lantry, as they had been school friends of sorts, both outsiders in the world of bullying teenagers and small communities. As Deirdre drip feeds chapters of her proposed novel, Jim is forced to go back to Rally and to face some stark truths about those chaotic fraught days of his youth.

Brilliantly conceived, Writers Anonymous places Jim Winters as a writer critiquing the work of other writers, whose chapters we also get insights into, all written in varying styles by the author, William Wall. As a device it takes a little adapting to but, as the story is slowly revealed, you are left quite powerless and wistful. Jim Winter’s character is split open, revealed for all to see and our empathy for him is slowly picked at as a game of cat and mouse ensues.

William Wall was a secondary school teacher in a boys school for over twenty years and his experiences of teenage bullying adds a very authentic element to the novel. Mattie Lantry is different. He had a tough upbringing and his sense of the world is in very stark contrast to that of the other teenagers in Rally. Young relationships are sensitively depicted with an expert pen, both visceral and acute. As Jim Winter is forced to acknowledge his past and the actions of his youthful self, his present starts to implode.

With an extraordinary eye for detail, William Wall has written a tense and challenging novel, an affecting story of a tragedy that was left unsolved but not forgotten. Tender and intense, it is an extremely engaging novel, one that Colin Walsh, author of KALA, describes as ‘playful and propulsive, sinister and melancholic’. Writers Anonymous is a heartrending and unsettling novel, one that inflames, confronts and demands the attention of the reader.

[ Thank you to New Island Books for a copy of Writers Anonymous in exchange for my honest review ]

[ Bio ]

William Wall is the author of seven previous novels, five volumes of poetry and three collections of short stories. His work has won many awards, including the Virginia Faulkner Award and the Raymond Carver Award. In 2017, he was the first European to win the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and, in 2021–2022, he was the first Poet Laureate for Cork City. His novel This is the Country was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.