A baby washes up in a barrel in this warm-hearted and surprising debut

Garrett Carr’s debut novel for adults begins in an accomplished storyteller’s hypnotic style. “We were a hardy people, raised facing the Atlantic. A few thousand men, women and children clinging to the coast and trying to stay dry. Our town wasn’t just a town, it was logic and a fate.” The first person plural pulls the reader in, makes us feel a part of the tale. The narrative technique opens up the life of a village in Donegal, its inhabitants, the way its eternal rhythms bump up against life’s surprises, the wonder concealed in so-called ordinary existence, and the politics of the wider world.

We begin in 1973, in a town connected not by the frantic ethereal drag of the internet, but by tight human bonds. So that one day, when an unexpected cargo washes up on the shore of Killybegs, the pattern of the place is altered irrevocably. Carr, who has published three YA novels and a nonfiction book, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, has a terrific knack for detail, both poetic and quotidian. The barrel is “made of tough plastic, the kind we used for exporting salted fish”. It’s lined with tinfoil, a concrete slab laid in for ballast: “On top of that was the baby, pink, eyes wide to the grey sky, well wrapped.”