A New Start in Finsbury
JOHN TAGUE
TLS
Philip Casey
THE WATER STAR
434pp. Picador. £14.99
0 330 37190 8
Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, confronts the central Irish experience of the twentieth century: exile. It is distinguished by the finely wrought lyricism that has characterized much of his poetry. His first novel, The Fabulists (1994), won acclaim; his new [...]

The scarring runs deeper than the flattened landscape in Philip Casey’s novel, set in postwar London
Washed ashore in a bomb-damaged land
THE WATER STAR
By Philip Casey
Picador, £14.99
ISBN 0 330 371 908
The water star is a reflection: imperfect, but beautiful in itself. Its darklit image shivers in a breath of wind, or is obscured by the observer’s [...]

Casey is a poet and a playwright; he has a poet’s delicate ear and a playwright’s eye for direction . The tale that unfolds in this thick, satisfying volume is not particularly complex – any more than the circumstances of any of our lives are complex, which is to say, infinitely and infinitesimally so.
Through the [...]