New Books In Literature

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the novel Rockaway Blue (Cornell UP, 2021) probes the griefs, trauma and resilience of Irish American New Yorkers wresting with the deaths and aftershocks of that terrible day. The book weaves throughout New York City, from the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan to Arab American Brooklyn, but it is so grounded in the Irish section of Rockaway in the borough of Queens that Rockaway itself becomes a kind of character Like all of Kirwan’s work, it has a strong sense of history. In Rockaway Blue, Kirwan looks back on September 11 with admiration for the genuine heroism of first responders and skepticism about the “blue wall of silence” in the New York City Police Department. Equally important, he approaches the dead of September 11, and their surviving friends, relatives and colleagues, as three-dimensional human beings with their own mix of strengths, weaknesses, virtues and flaws. Kirwan is the author of five other books, including the novel Rocki