i bought this book after reading several reviews praising it to the heavens and was extremely dissapointed after i read it. i found this a tedious book to read, the plot didn't seem to really go anywhere and the characters were never developed properly. the only reason to read this book would be for the descriptive language it uses, but the "plot" of the book detracts from even this. don't waste your money.

Ode to a Nightingale, which reflects John Keats's mournful state of mind in the face of the beauty and liveliness of nature, inspires the title of this sad but suspenseful book and parallels its melancholy tone. McCabe, like Keats, is in the thrall of nature in this novel, but McCabe's nature is not sentimentalized. Whatever beauty exists is wild, sometimes harsh and even savage, like the reality of life for the farm folk who populate the novel. Nature's everyday challenges are intensified here by the social and political challenges of Ireland in the 1880's: Catholic vs. Protestant rivalries, the upheavals of Charles Stewart Parnell and the Fenians, the assassinations of British aristocrats, the legacy of the famine, and the tenuousness of life itself.

Primarily a domestic drama, the novel describes one day in the life of Beth Winters, a Catholic in a community which is equally divided between Catholics and Protestants. Depicting her cleverness and resilience in the face of her difficult farm life, McCabe focuses on her 25th birthday and the events which have led to the crisis which is the novel's focus--the circumstances of her birth, her abuse by her putative father, and her attraction to Liam Ward, a Protestant firebrand. Full of local color, lively dialogue, sometimes mystifying dialect, and powerful nature imagery, Beth's personal drama achieves wider significance as the characters, confronting issues of life and death, separately reveal the inherent (natural) violence lurking in everyone just below the surface. Political and religious rivalries complicate the personal conflicts between Beth, her father, and her lover, and the suspense builds to a crescendo.

In terse prose which is so restrained that the reader must bring his/her own intelligence to the interpretation of the action, McCabe creates a final scene of devastating power, addressing the violence within us all and making it understandable, plausible, and ultimately shocking. The traumas here are the traumas of real life, the characters are practical and tied to the earth, the prose is unburdened by excessive verbiage, and McCabe's message rings true.

Eugene McCabe's DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES absolutely picked me up and dropped me - the book was that powerful and moving. For a novel set in 1883 in rural Ireland to transport me as a reader so quickly and thoroughly shows me the hand of a master at work. This is an author that I am pleased to have discovered - and one whose work I will actively seek.

McCabe's writing style is as rough-hewn as the characters he portrays - but this is deceptive, because there are many subtleties at work here. His descriptive abilities are staggering - but most of the story is carried along either as conversation or as revelations to the reader of the characters' thoughts. Another reviewer commented that the author's style almost compelled the reader to create the story while reading it - and that's a pretty apt description of the 'work' required of the reader to grasp the monumental achievement of this novel. This 'work' is not toil-in-vain, however - there is a great reward to putting forth a little effort here.

The characters are vivid and real - and the story is one that involves love, family, politics, class struggle and murder. There is a palpable air of mystery and suspense that permeates the story, one that keeps the reader guessing, rapt until the end. There are likable characters whose treachery lurks just beneath the surface, as well as persons who seem to be less than respectable at first glance who turn out to be made of stout moral fibre - and there are those as well who are just as they seem, so I'm not really giving anything away with these statements. There's also one of the most unlikely heroes you're liable to run across anywhere.

I'd be tempted to say that this book is one of the best reading experiences I've come across in the past couple of years - I read this from the local library, but it's definitely one I'm going to want to acquire for my own collection. This is a 'keeper'.

This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the troubles in Northern Ireland. It's a collection of touching stories about Catholics, Protestants - IRA members to UDA members and their everyday dilemmas while living in this troubled region.

This is an important, harrowing and beautiful book. Important, because it takes an historical event that has been abstracted by ideologues - the Great Famine - and restores its humanity. Harrowing because of the descriptions of this disaster, not of its social or political importance, but the way it effected families and destroyed the land, creating a tangible atmosphere of death. It is (perversely?) beautiful because, like all McCabe works, it is alive to the harsh beauty of nature, and also because the four speakers of these monologues try to order the horrors by telling stories, full of excuses, self-delusion and bitter hatred, but also nostalgia, revelation and epiphany. The book works by taking stock figures from the Famine - the Orphan, the Landlord, etc. - and making them compellingly human and complex, not bogeymen.