It’s so beautifully written that you find yourself wanting to highlight every sentence, every perfect turn of phrase. But she is quick to point out that the back story she created is pure fiction and is in no way related to this man, who was named as Peter Bergmann. I too was thinking of Reservoir 13 as I was reading your review which has really piqued my interest.

Sheila Armstrong is in love with the world and its people, and that love shines out clearly in this luminous novel; a novel built on the stories of one small village, shaken loose when a body falls unannounced on the beach. Nothing I’ve never experienced before (in recent memory, Fernanda Melchor did the sprawling multi-character narrative centred on a dead person much more effectively than this ) but I found that there were elements of this book that simply would not have been possible were it written by someone else. Each character feels a portrait of someone I know or have known in my own life, and there is such a care and attention paid to the evocation of the world around the characters that they feel even more true to life.

Each chapter is from a different character's viewpoint, and just as their lives intersect, crossing back and forth with a staggering attention to detail, we learn more of our mystery man. Armstrong has a very powerful voice, an eye for nuance and image that far exceeds many of her contemporaries, and she puts it to good use here.

The story delves into its history and the enigma of the dead man, peeling back the lives of everybody involved. His hands are folded neatly in his lap, his ankles are crossed, and a faint smile is on his otherwise lifeless face. Others were kept chained belowdecks at the docks before sailing into the horizon, without even a glimpse of this green shore. Some of us leapt overboard, iron shackles around our ankles, rather than become slaves to heartless men. of an unidentified man found dead on a Irish beach apparently of natural causes (his body racked with cancer).

Vaak zijn dit eenzame, stugge mensen waar slechts af en toe een glimpje menselijkheid aan af te lezen is. The disquieting story of an unidentified man as told by those who crossed paths with him on the last day of his life, Sheila Armstrong’s debut novel is haunting, lyrical and darkly suspenseful. She often decides to lock the door, draw the shutters and sit for a time on one of the hard plastic chairs. The officer in charge jumps at what seems a lead that will close the case only to feel a fool when it proves to be a fraud.

It's quite a melancholy tale - the sadness of a sick man dying completely alone is what moved me most of all. She is bright, too bright for her own good, according to her teachers, but she is raw and easily bruised, like a half-peeled mango.

I totally appreciated what Sheila was trying to do here, but I really started to lose momentum half way through the book, right through to what I found to be an unsatisfying conclusion. They pay dearly for hope, but bodies are money and money is bodies; this has always been the way of it. I hope Falling Animals gets published in the US; while it is set in Ireland it, the man could have been found on any remote beach in a small town. My hope is that readers won’t be too concerned with the man’s identity by the end – the other characters will have become just as important, their stories just as gripping. The stunning cover on Falling Animals will surely have readers picking this up off the shelves, but dive into this story, and you'll not be disappointed.