The Little Red Chairs

"On a cold, dark night, a stranger arrives in an Irish village. In this novel about a Bosnian war criminal in hiding, the tragic is marbled with the quotidian, the quotidian with the tragic. A cook “plunges lobsters into vats of boiling water and prays for the repose of their soul.” During a massacre, gunmen asked for chairs to sit in, they were “so tired from killing.” Even mass murderers get sore legs, even cooking dinner has its shades of horror. Edna O’Brien captures this doubleness with eerie and nuanced precision."