No News at Throat Lake - Hardcover

Donegan, Lawrence

3.72

166 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670882208 ISBN 13: 9780670882205

Publisher: PENGUIN UK, 1999

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This text presents a Guardian journalist's account of his year working on the Tirconail Tribune - only 12 pages long, with a circulation of 2500. Serving the people of the Donegal coast, the paper is published in the small coastal town of Creeslough, and it is here that Donegan lived during 1998. The town had a grocer's shop, a hardware store, one solitary pub and a pitch and putt course.

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Review:

Despite talk of the economic "Celtic Tiger" and Dublin's growing clout as a high-tech center, the Ireland of the imagination is still the Ireland of village and bog, with 40 shades of green and pints of creamy Guinness for young and old alike. In No News at Trout Lake, Lawrence Donegan first journeys to the village of Creeslough in search of such stereotypes, but his book succeeds not by celebrating clich�s but by exploring the complexity and contradictions beneath them.

Caught in the throes of a premature midlife crisis, Donegan, a London journalist, pulls up stakes and moves to an Irish village he once visited on holiday. The book chronicles his (mis)adventures there, from an abortive attempt at cattle farming (described here as "Quentin Tarantino's All Creatures Great and Small") through a series of exploits with the rambunctious editors of the Tirconaill Tribune, a feisty local paper. Donegan relates his experiences, which include a hunt for a whale tooth and a visit from Newt Gingrinch, and describes his companions in Creeslough with great intimacy and wit. This is certainly not the final word on "the Irish character," if such a thing even exists, but Donegan's story abounds with charming characters, Irish and otherwise, providing a meditation on small-town life that is at once universal and as unique as the Irish village it describes. --Andrew Nieland

About the Author:

Lawrence Donegan was born in Scotland in 1961. Before joining London's Guardian as a journalist, he played bass guitar with two successful pop groups, the Bluebells and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. Donegan is the acclaimed author of Maybe It Should Have Been a Three Iron, which was named the best book of the year by the U.S. Golf Association.

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