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'When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my
studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great
mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology
...' It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his
illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands,
where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One
afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling
him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'. Lobachevsky may
not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death
sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small
island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest
seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think
about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home
again
Bungalow Bliss, first published in 1971, was a book of house
designs that buyers could use to build a home for themselves
affordably. It first appeared two years before Ireland was to
join the EEC as a self-published catalogue by Jack Fitzsimons
from his Kells Art Studios in County Meath. He and his wife
designed and collated it and printed it locally. Fitzsimons
sold these books out of his car to newsagents, petrol garages
and bookshops. Over the course of thirty years, Fitzsimons sold
over a quarter of a million copies of his catalogue. The
first edition contained twenty designs – the final edition
contained two hundred and sixty. This guidebook of how to build
your own home radically transformed housing in Ireland. Now,
for the first time, author and structural engineer Adrian
Duncan looks at the cultural impact that Bungalow Bliss and
the accessible bungalow design had on the housing market, the
Irish landscape, and on the individual families who made
these bungalows their homes.
'Duncan brings a new way of seeing to the world of prose' Irish
Times Michael has been away from Ireland for most of his life and
lives alone in Bilbao after the death of Catherine, his girlfriend.
Each day he listens to two versions of the same piece of music
before walking the same route to visit Richard Serra's enormous
installation, The Matter of Time, in the Guggenheim. As he walks,
his thoughts circle around the five-year period of mental agitation
spent in Leipzig with Catherine. This 'sabbatical', caused by the
stress of his job and the suicide of a former colleague, splits his
career as an engineer into two distinct parts. Intensely realistic,
mapped out like Michael's intricate drawings, this is a novel of
precision and beguiling intelligence.
'When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my
studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great
mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology
...' It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his
illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands,
where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One
afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling
him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'. Lobachevsky may
not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death
sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small
island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest
seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think
about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home
again
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