Changes

|title=All That is Solid Melts into Air

|author=Darragh McKeon

|publisher=Viking

|date=March 2014

|summary=A very surprising choice for a debut novel from Ireland; an intelligent look at different Soviet-era lives that was clever, but did not compel as much as I would have liked.

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Moscow, 1986, and a nine-year old piano prodigy is trapped in a subway station by bullies, who carefully break one of his little fingers. Rehearsal cancelled, the boy finds his favourite aunt, who takes him to treatment only to discover her ex-husband the doctor involved. Many miles away a slightly older young man is off on his first hunting trip with the men of the village, only to find diseased cows, and the grouse they seek sickly and weirdly uncoordinated. What has affected them, and will of course affect all the characters in the book, is the nuclear disaster in the plant at Chernobyl.

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