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“... achievements of a style. A Nails on the Head, a first collection of stories by the Irish writer, Clare Boylan, whose admirable first novel, Holy Pictures, came out in February, satisfyingly gives us a dramatic logic of sequence without renouncing the particularity of each of its 15 elements: patterns of recurrence and variation set up a creative ...”

“... Lisa St Aubin de Teran’s The Slow Train to Milan and Clare Boylan’s Holy Pictures share a subject – girls growing up to a world whose language is new to them – which demands close attention to the register of words and sentences, a measure of novelty and an enactment of surprise. Many of their sentences glint with recognitions, giving back a fine pleasure out of the often painful misunderstandings and reverses they render ...”

“... they tell us more: ‘There are two distinct branches of the O’Hallorans in Ireland, one from Clare and the other from Galway.’ In the Eumaeus episode, when Bloom reads the Evening Telegraph and finds a mention of the funeral of ‘the late Mr Patrick Dignam’ that he himself has attended, we get this dry annotation: ‘The 16 June 1904 Evening ...”