The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien6/19/2023 Their relationship, which is tenderly drawn, becomes the undoing of Fidelma, when Dr Vlad is caught and exposed as a war criminal. But he settles in and wins over his harshest critics, including Fidelma McBride, a woman caught up in a sexless marriage, who has an affair with him. Here, Dr Vlad sets up a clinic as an alternative healer and sex therapist, thereby creating a bit of a stir with the locals, many of whom regard him as a hippy and a charlatan. O’Brien’s novel looks at the long-lasting impact of that siege - and war in general - and focuses on a fictionalised war criminal from Montenegro (said to be loosely based on Radovan Karadzic) who goes in to hiding in a little Irish village. More than 600 of those chairs represented the number of children that died. The chairs represented the number of people killed during the siege, which lasted almost four years. The book’s title refers to the 11,541 red chairs that were put out on the Serajevo high street to mark the 20th anniversary of the start of the Siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces. Many of the reviews in the mainstream press are billing it as her masterpiece. (She’s written a memoir and a collection of short stories in the intervening years.) The book is about war crimes, retribution and justice. The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien is the Irish writer’s first novel in 10 years. Fiction – hardcover Faber & Faber 320 pages 2015.
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