Empty Bed Blues

When Kate Holohan’s husband dies suddenly, the extent of his disastrous financial speculation is revealed – together with a mistress and a secret love-nest in the small Italian fishing port of Camogli. Unwilling to take on the ocean of debt and deceit she has inherited, Kate abandons her home and teaching job and flees to Italy in the hope of making a new life. Her new neighbour, Anna Ferrara, is a formidable and mysterious older lady who takes Kate under her wing, teaching her Italian, finding her work and offering her friendship and more. But it will be Anna’s past – as a journalist, writer, former Resistance fighter and a committed communist – that will also challenge Kate and force her to reconsider her responsibilities back home and the values she truly wants to represent. Over three seasons, William Wall conjures the colours, tastes and scents of Liguria, as Empty Bed Blues explores the intersection of friendship, love, language, debt and politics, all told with humour, sensitivity and gold standard storytelling.  

About the Author :
WILLIAM WALL is the author of six 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. williamwall.net

Review :
A quietly devastating expression of his strength – the precision of a poet’s worldview elegantly extended to achieve a meaningful narrative ...Through his lyrical style, Wall offers a moving account of a woman stoically refusing to unravel, with astutely drawn characters and moments of great levity. Ultimately the time spent with Kate in her Italian idyll has the potential to prove as restorative for the reader as it does for her. This is a delicate storytelling that elevates the trivialities of life to something significant, as all great literature does. ‘The author’s love for Italy imbues his latest novel, Empty Bed Blues, with a wonderful sense of place.’ Empty Bed Blues is a novel with great depth. There are multiple layers and many literary references scattered throughout that add a richness to the narrative but at no point overwhelm it. Praise for Graces’ Day ‘At the peak of his powers.’ —Sunday Times Praise for This is the Country ‘Wall has infused his tale with lyricism and true compassion.’ —Books Ireland Praise for This is the Country ‘a masterful, ironic book of loss and bitter optimism, money and poverty, the impossible divide between city and country. Wall has an admirable power of poignant description. Wall's touch with characterisation is light and deft . . .’ —The Guardian Praise for Ghost Estate ‘Ghost Estate is a deeply political book, but it also articulates a profound interest in and engagement with questions of aesthetics and poetics. . . . reminds us that the spectres that trouble our world are not only local but global and we ignore them at our peril. . . . a poet who takes his political responsibilities seriously.’ —Philip Coleman, Southward Praise for Ghost Estate  ‘William Wall has a masterful capacity to depict ambiguity. The striking lack of punctuation throughout the volume and the hidden motifs of thresholds vividly capture transience and doubt as the essence of frail humanity.’ —The Irish Times Praise for Suzy Suzy ‘Suzy Suzy is everything a great book should be – humorous, poignant and utterly original. With a wickedly funny central character, a gripping and propulsive plot, several unsolved mysteries and real-life, ragged endings, this is the sort of book that readers will be immediately absorbed by and which writers, like this one, can only admire and learn from.’ —Julia Kelly, The Irish Times Praise for Suzy Suzy ‘An inventive and wickedly funny take on surviving the teenage years . . . This seems like a young-adult novel, or even a coming-of-age-story on the outset. But Suzy brings much more than that to the table. It is a hard-hitting read that is funny at times, and well worth your time.’ —Dublin Inquirer Praise for Alice Falling  ‘Wall's undeniable gift for language is a powerful weapon. This novel shows a heightened awareness of and attention to the suggestive power of words that is more common in poetry than in fiction. Even the most seemingly functional novelistic prose reveals itself to be poetically concentrated with meaning, with irony or tenderness. There's a sly black humour unobtrusively at work, as in the passing reference to depressed housewives swapping their medication at gin mornings. Wall goes deeper into the complexities of characterisation than many contemporary novelists. His people are vividly, credibly inconstant: shifting viewpoints and the vagaries of their relationships show them now sympathetic, now inept or calculating.’ —The Independent