Dr Ken Newell New children’s book tells a simple story while new memoir and novel share vivid stories
Captured by a Vision: a Memoir
by Ken Newell
(Colourpoint, Newtownards, £12.99; sales@colourpoint.co.uk)
Rev. Dr Kenneth Newell is an Ulster Presbyterian minister. His ministry was largely spent at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in Belfast.
Born in North Belfast, just after the city was blitzed, he went to Queen’s and then to the Presbyterian College. After service in Bangor, he went out to the troubled island of Timor in the East Indies. He found the Christian climate of Timor a horizon-widening experience.
A return to the more fraught nature of life, faith and politics in Northern Ireland was a challenge. His commitment was to peacemaking and building lasting relationships with representatives of different and divided communities in Belfast.
He gives a vivid very human account of all the tides of conflict and change in the years between 1975 and the Good Friday agreement in 1998. He also served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (2004-2005). He sees his life as one of achievement in other ways, but historians will use his book in decades to come as an important source.
For Catholics too it gives many insights into the ways in which Ireland as a whole has changed. But his life of encounters, friendships, and mission still goes on, retired or not.
Eva’s Journey
by Sr Bernadette Joyce
(Columba Press, €14.99)
The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the bleakest places for human survival in the world. This is, however, the setting for Bernadette Joyce’s novel. Based on real events (as novelists so often say) it is also informed by Sr Bernadette’s own experiences in Chile as an Irish Presentation Sister. Ill health brought her home, but she has realised in the story of Eva a moving account of the experiences of many ordinary people in the struggle to survive and achieve justice in the post-Pinochet years.
Though now out of the headlines, the troubled lives of Chileans haunt the author’s memory. She is donating the royalties from this book to support those who live in the shanty towns on the edge of the desert. Anyone concerned about Chile, with which Ireland has such long and complicated connections, should buy and read her book, a moving tribute to human endurance and faith.
Hello Little Egg, an Oona and Baba adventure
Developed from the television series Puffin Rock by Dog Ears Productions/Cartoon Saloon
(Puffin Books, £6.99)
The Puffin Rock television series for young children has sprung to prominence as a worldwide success for the Kilkenny-based production company, which has made the programme with the participation of Cartoon Saloon in the US and Penguin Ireland.
The story is enchantingly simple and appealing. Oona and her little brother Baba have to find the parents of a mysterious egg before it hatches. All kind of frolics and perils are in store before they find the guillemots who welcome back their lost hatchling. More books are to follow with more about Oona and Baba and their six very varied friends on an off-shore Irish island.