Tanglewood is an impressive feat by an author fearlessly interrogating one of the most traumatic moments in recent Irish history. It’s a mirror to an age when the party ended.

Bolger is a gifted storyteller and prose stylist…a gripping, well-observed examination of the corrosive effects of greed on love, relationships and families.

Bolger is a witty and sensitive writer…who has always been attuned to social issues…Bolger writes about love and grief particularly well, and it is refreshing to see such an open portrait of the sexual lives if each of the characters, from menopausal Alice to lesbian Sophie, from sexually shy Chris to sexually rampant Ronan…Tanglewood makes…

Only a writer of Bolger’s precision and suppleness could wade back through the nation’s self-loathing into that mess and mine new truths, treasures to be heeded and learned from…Bolger isn’t meditating on regret, love, moral fibre, greed and carpe diem – he’s setting the record straight on them…This is storytelling that flows deep and soundly,…

Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood is a superb novel about the implosion not only of the economy in the mid-2000s, but the implosion of marriage and morality and memory too. Bolger does it masterfully, as always. He has been prying open the Irish ribcage since he was 16 years old. With Tanglewood all his talents are on…

An absorbing meditation on marriage, masculinity, parenting and the general anxieties of the middle class… Bolger approaches these variegated lives with a wisdom that contrasts sharply with the benightedness of those he depicts. On every page, insight and illumination are found, as might be expected from one of Ireland’s most perceptive writers.