WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Thin Places
Solace for troubled soul in Ireland’s natural world
THE INSPIRER: poet Paul Muldoon
[Alejandro Arras/Creative Commons] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
KERRI NI DOCHARTAIGH’S Thin Places comes in on a tidal wave of nature books. Alarm at the speed of destruction of the natural world has set many writers to work and many publishers to spot a market.
Described as “a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing,” Ni Dochartaigh in this, her first book, turns to wild places and animals as a form of psychic escape.
It is the traumatic legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles that creates the constantly unsettled fugitive, finding balm in the wild swimming she loves, in rivers, lakes and seas flowing through what she calls “thin places.”
More from this author
FIONA O'CONNOR recommends a biography that is a beautiful achievement and could stand as a manifesto for the power of subtlety in art
FIONA O’CONNOR is fascinated by a novel written from the perspective of a neurodivergent psychology student who falls in love
FIONA O’CONNOR steps warily through a novel that skewers many of the exposed flanks of the over-privileged
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
