Novels
Harte's first novel, In the Wake of the Bagger, was published in 2006. It was commissioned by Sligo Co Council under the Irish Government's Per Cent for Art scheme. It tells the story of the Dowd family, who are uprooted from their home in Killeenduff and resettle as economic migrants in the Irish Midlands. It describes the tension between the traditional Irish way of life and the new realities of industrialization in rural Ireland. The novel was described in the Irish Independent as "one of the great books about Ireland." It was selected by Des Kenny as one of his 101 Irish Books You MUST Read – Kenny's Choice.
Harte's second novel is Reflections in a Tar-Barrel. It was first published in Bulgarian translation in 2007.
Unravelling the Spiral is an account of the life of Harte's cousin, sculptor Fred Conlon. Harte and Conlon were born within ten months of each other in the townland of Killeenduff, grew up together, and were close friends until Conlon's death.
Read more about this topic: Jack Harte (Irish Writer)
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)