Himself

Himself by Jess Kidd
Published: 2017
Narrated by: Aiden Kelly
Length: 09:47 (384 pages)

This is a 1970s small-town murder mystery with a touch of the supernatural. A man named Mahony is travelling back to his hometown, the small (fictional?) Irish village of Mulderrig, to discover why he was left in an orphanage as an infant. When he arrives, he quickly discovers from a letter that he was taken from his mother under seemingly nefarious circumstances and is warned not to trust anyone in town.

It’s a book that pulls from a lot of genres. There’s the main detective plotline, a comedic small-town slice of life aspect, an underlying supernatural ghost tale, and I’ve also heard it referred to as literary fiction, which might just mean that someone who doesn’t read genre fiction enjoyed it. The magic realism is handled in a really interesting way. Mahony can converse with the spirits of the dead, but it’s never really treated as anything too unusual. It’s almost just a mundane skill he happens to have.

I really enjoyed the story, the characters were charming and memorable, and the narrator of the audiobook was fantastic. Jess Kidd (great outlaw name if the writing doesn’t work out, which it clearly will) published her second novel this year, The Hoarder, and I’ll be sure to pick that up.