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To Avenge a Dead Glacier
Winner of the RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story Prize and the John McGahern Award, Shane Tivenan is a remarkable new talent. This debut collection simmers with style, verve, tension and humour. Throughout the stories in To Avenge a Dead Glacier, Tivenan explores the lives of rural Irish outsiders. His characters are artists, sean-nós singers, members of the queer community, the gifted, the neurodivergent, the environmentally concerned, people with memory problems, the spiritual people, the non-human.
In the title story, a man attends the funeral of a glacier in Iceland without fully knowing why he is there. In another, a midlands graffiti artist warns his townspeople through his throw-ups about the dangers of the way they are living, but neglects his own mind in the process. In 'Honey Brown', a ninety-two-year-old woman who suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome tries to celebrate her birthday in a nursing home in Roscommon while fighting back the hallucinations brought on by her condition. In 'Resurrection of a Corncrake', a semi-retired plasterer is haunted by the silencing of the birds in his townland, a silencing which he knows he took part in.
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.
In the title story, a man attends the funeral of a glacier in Iceland without fully knowing why he is there. In another, a midlands graffiti artist warns his townspeople through his throw-ups about the dangers of the way they are living, but neglects his own mind in the process. In 'Honey Brown', a ninety-two-year-old woman who suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome tries to celebrate her birthday in a nursing home in Roscommon while fighting back the hallucinations brought on by her condition. In 'Resurrection of a Corncrake', a semi-retired plasterer is haunted by the silencing of the birds in his townland, a silencing which he knows he took part in.
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.
265 pages, Paperback
Published October 21, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 3, 2025
I picked this book up in Athlone Ireland at the recommendation of the proprietor. I am not disappointed. I love this collection of short stories. Just gives a reader the feeling of local culture. If you have never been to Ireland it could be a challenge to understand some of the lingo. But I look forward to revisiting these stories from time to time if I am missing Ireland😊
September 7, 2025
Ah wow what a book! Very funny and very sad. Feels like there’s this rumble beneath all the stories. Hard to believe that the same person wrote all these different stories, but you can also sense a connection between all of them.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews