Colin Walsh’s remarkably assured debut begins with an epigraph from Margaret Atwood. In Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye, an artist returns to her Canadian home town only to be flooded with painful memories from her youth, particularly related to her estranged friend – and erstwhile bully – Cordelia. In Walsh’s novel, it is the eponymous Kala who plagues the memories of her former friends as they reunite for the first time in more than a decade in the Irish seaside village of Kinlough.
Spiky journalist Helen has returned, reluctantly, from Canada to attend her father’s wedding. LA-based rock star Joe Brennan is back for a series of gigs, basking in the role of local boy done (very) good. Meanwhile, sweet, self-conscious Mush never left – he still spends his days working in his mum’s coffee shop and his nights nursing cans of beer, wondering what might have been.
