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‘Petrol is a masterpiece: deeply original and inspired.’ Bernard O’Donoghue
‘Such genuine, witty writing is a rarity.’
Rachel Cusk
‘She shows an impressive command of what feels like the ideal narrative medium: individual moments and drive of narrative in perfect coordination, language alive and kicking.’ – Christopher Reid
Petrol re-affirms, for the 21st century, the traditional gift for storytelling long associated with Irish writers, in a wholly unique and enrapturing manner’.
- Tony Murray, Director, Irish Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University
‘Here, the world turns upon a pub, a petrol pump and an impossible love. … Martina Evans’ world is transfixed by personal drama, by epiphanies in bars and Icebergs, Aztecs and Bloody Marys creating a kind of alcoholic, consumerist birdlife that sings above the human drama. Evans’ imagination is a unique one, darting, flitting, resonating with personal and poetic voices. As a poet she is one of a kind and brilliant.’ – Thomas McCarthy
‘In the wings of Imelda’s small world, there’s a cast of locals who sit on their high stools around the bar and call to the shop to fill their petrol tanks and collect their “messages”. They lend such texture and authenticity that the seemingly humdrum events of the McConnell sisters’ history are every bit as complex, tumultuous, humorous and tragic as any of the films, television programmes and books which surround Imelda, from Ryan’s Daughter, to Night Gallery, to Catcher in the Rye.’ Sara Baume Southword Magazine
BLOODY Marys, Jaysus! Granddad was disgusted beside the range, Lucky standing on his lap, wet nose pointing high in the air when Agnes ran in from the bar, her brown velour arm wrapped around the plastic ball of the Coca-Cola ice bucket. It’s far from ice they were reared! Granddad said but Justin always made Bloody Marys for his favourites, slim dark women who wore their clothes like Jackie Kennedy. It was a big operation with all the stuff and the Tabasco sauce stirred with a long clanking spoon. Granddad ground his teeth as Agnes tore the tray from the side of the yellow-iced freezer, staggering on her high brown clogs in her modest A-line corduroy skirt. I, too, was thinking she was too good for this work. They don’t know what they want, Granddad said. Ice one minute, hot whiskeys the next.Those bloody women, the Bloody Mary drinkers. And his last comment when the ice cubes tumbled into the Coca-Cola bucket, every single woman that Justin ever took on suffered from her nerves.
from Petrol, Anvil Press 2012
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