the Dublin Review

In the spring issue of the Dublin Review, Tom Lee writes about his mother’s long struggle with bipolar disease, and in particular the spells of mania when her energy was infinite and her judgement often impaired. ‘The Accelerations’ is a loving and searching account of the ravages of his mother’s illness and a subtle exploration of its possible origins.

Also in the spring issue, Niamh Cullen tells the very strange story of what happened after she arrived to her university office one day to find that a bird – or birds – had built a nest and laid two eggs in it. How had the mother bird got in? What sort of bird was she? Did the eggs have a chance of hatching? Cullen’s account of the days that followed is gripping, surprising and thought-provoking.

Kathleen MacMahon’s short story ‘Warriors’ follows a couple on their first holiday without their kids – from their hotel room to poolside to a bar where they meet an American academic who claims to have been advising Ukrainian troops on the battlefield. It is a beautifully observed and atmospheric study of the coexistence of intimacy and alienation in a marriage.

The spring Dublin Review also includes Ian Sansom’s diary for 2025, another witty and bracing instalment in his chronicle of his own life and that of his family; Liam Harrison’s vivid chronicle of a summer he spent working on a ranch in northern California; Maartje Scheltens’s account of a project to create an archive of the processes and materials used in the last years of paper-based publishing; and Philip Connors’s essay about the annual reunion of the small group of people who spend each summer alone in mountaintop towers, looking out for wildfires in a vast national park in the American south-west.