The book begins in Ireland in the 1940s: The Catholic Church is all-powerful, and anything outside the norm is not only frowned upon but punished. For example, having a child outside marriage, as Catherine Goggin, a pregnant teenager in an Irish village finds out. She is exposed by the priest and banished from the village. (It turns out later that the priest himself had fathered children out of wedlock.)

Catherine heads for Dublin where she moves in with Seàn and Jack. It takes Catherine a while to realize that they were a gay couple. Being gay in 1940s Ireland was a crime, so the two men were taking a huge risk in living together. When Seàn’s father finds them, it all goes horribly wrong.

Catherine gives her child, Cyril, up for adoption. Charles and Maude Avery, a middle-class couple, raise him. Although Cyril does not have an unhappy childhood, it isn’t one filled with love. Maude is a writer and an eccentric. Charles makes it clear that Cyril is not a real Avery, who is tolerated rather than loved.

Then at 10 years old, he meets Julian, a boy his own age, and is smitten. Already at that age, Cyril realizes that he is different from the others, and it was not something that would be accepted. “Even at that tender age I knew that there was something about me that was different and that it would be impossible ever to put right.” The two boys become friends, but Julian does not suspect that his friend is in love with him. As a gay man in an Ireland where it is still a crime, Cyril has to live a double life, hiding his real self under a mask.

The book follows Cyril as he grows up and joins the civil service. He often eats in the parliament’s cafeteria, where Catherine Goggin rules the roost. Mother and son take a liking to each other without knowing about the very real bond between them.

The book follows Cyril as he eventually leaves Ireland for Amsterdam, where he finds love with a Danish doctor, Bastiaan, and is finally able to live openly as a gay man. The couple move to New York in the 1980s. It may have been a more open time, but prejudice hasn’t exactly disappeared.  AIDS, commonly known as a “gay disease”, is spreading and gay men are held responsible.

Cyril’s story comes full circle, as he returns to Ireland. It is now the 2000s, and Ireland is a very different place.

Through the life of Cyril from his childhood to old age, John Boyne gives us a sense of what it means to be gay and how things have changed—or not—over the decades. It is unimaginable how difficult it was—and still is in some parts of the world—just to be open about who you are.

While Cyril is no saint, which makes him more interesting, Bastiaan is a little too good to be true. But the characters who really come alive here are the women, especially Catherine, who is feisty, strong and funny. My one grip with it is that the book is full of coincidences worthy of a Bollywood film (or Shakespeare?): people meet up against all odds, which drives the story but does require a suspension of disbelief. But on the whole, it is a moving and redemptive story.

Note: The title is from something that the political theorist Hannah Arendt is supposed to have said about the poet W.H. Auden: “life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face”.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”

This quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero sets up the theme of this book. After Tom’s father retires, he becomes obsessed with tracing his family’s history. At first, Tom is bored and irritated by his father’s long accounts of what he has found, but finds himself drawn into the story.

The book moves between the past and the present, between the two sides of the family that came together to create Tom’s father. It all begins with William, a child from a poor family in Lancashire in 1830, scaring away birds from a field to earn a few pennies from the farmer. The death of his parents pushes him to leave the village, heading for Manchester.   

The enigma at the heart of the story is Elias Crane, Tom’s grandfather. Tom’s father never really knew him well—Elias was distant, a man who found it hard to show his emotions. But the discovery of a sepia photograph and a letter in Elias’s handwriting hold clues to his past. 

Having grown up in a loveless house with a stern father who could only punish and threaten, Elias becomes secretive and scornful of authority. “To have been forced to respect what he loathed, to fear where he should have loved, to have grown up to be lonely and secretive, always with an unnameable chill of dread about his heart—he saw how all these things conspired to make him what he was. And now he was a man, still he was powerless to shape his own fate.”

But he does get away, and it is with him that the paths of these two families converge.

This is a quick read, but perceptive about the damage that people inflict on each other. It also reminded me about our connection with our ancestors—whether we have anything to do with them or not, we carry their genes and their histories within us. It is moving, and well-written for a first book.

“Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea… . Then within the marsh…true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests. Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light in its muddy throat. … A swamp knows all about death, and doesn’t necessarily define it as a tragedy, certainly not a sin.”

The book starts with the discovery of a body in the swamp, the body of Chase Andrews, an arrogant womanizer. But this is more than a murder mystery. It is the story of a girl who grows up in the coastal marshes of North Carolina, a place where people move to when they are running away from something, often the law. The town’s people look down on the marsh folk and treat them like trash.

Kya lives with her family in the marsh. Her father is abusive, and her siblings get away as soon as they can. But Kya suffers the biggest blow when her mother walks out without a backward glance, leaving her alone with her brother Jodie and her father. Eventually Jodie follows his siblings and her father dies. The only people Kya has now are an old black man known as Jumpin’, who runs a store by the water, and his wife. They become her friends and parent figures.

Then two men come into her life and change it. Although Kya is illiterate—her one foray to school was a disaster—her knowledge of the marsh is encyclopaedic. Jodie’s friend, Tate, recognizes her innate intelligence and teaches her to read. They fall in love, but after Tate leaves for university, she doesn’t see him again.

Meanwhile, there have been rumours in town about a wild woman living in the swamp and the young men compete to see who will take her first. Chase Andrews starts visiting her and becomes her lover. He promises to marry her but has no intention of seeing it through.

Then one day Chase ends up dead in the swamp, and Kya is accused of murdering him. But did she do it?

Kya is a wonderful creation—talented, strong-willed and independent. The book is seen through her point of view. Even during the trial where her life is at stake, she can’t help observing the way the principal players reveal their status:

“The judge, obviously the alpha male, was secure in his position, so his posture was imposing, but relaxed and unthreatened as the territorial boar. Tom Milton [the defence attorney], too, exerted confidence and rank with easy movements and stance. A powerful buck, acknowledged as such. The prosecutor, on the other hand, relied on wide, bright ties and broad-shouldered suit jackets to enhance his status. He threw his weight by flinging his arms or raising his voice.”

But Kya is not the only one at the heart of Where the Crawdads Sing: the marsh is a character in its own right. Delia Owens obviously knows and loves the marshlands and her love comes through in this book. There is a vivid, magical quality about them—when the scene shifts to the town, it feels like the colours fade. Owens not only tells a fascinating tale but shines a light on the beauty and the sheer diversity of creatures that live in this relatively unknown habitat. I enjoyed the story but what made this book stand out for me was the lyrical description of the marshes.