The Glorious Heresies: Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliot Prize 2016: Winner of the Baileys' Women's Prize for Fiction 2016 - Softcover

McInerney, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 144479888X ISBN 13: 9781444798883

Publisher: John Murray, 2015

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS' WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016

WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOT PRIZE 2016

We all do stupid things when we're kids.

Ryan Cusack's grown up faster than most - being the oldest of six with a dead mum and an alcoholic dad will do that for you.

And nobody says Ryan's stupid. Not even behind his back.

It's the people around him who are the problem. The gangland boss using his dad as a 'cleaner'. The neighbour who says she's trying to help but maybe wants something more than that. The prostitute searching for the man she never knew she'd miss until he disappeared without trace one night . . .

The only one on Ryan's side is his girlfriend Karine. If he blows that, he's all alone.

But the truth is, you don't know your own strength till you need it.

About this title

Review:

A rich, touching, hilarious novel (Financial Times)

A spectacular debut . . . a head-spinning, stomach-churning state-of-the-nation novel about a nation falling apart (Telegraph)

A big, brassy, sexy beast of a book (Irish Times)

A superb debut from a confident and comic writer (Mail on Sunday)

Fiendishly hilarious (The Times)

All the trappings of a possible future classic . . . a fascinating and accomplished commentary on modern Irish life (Big Issue)

A daring, exuberant and generous novel (Observer)

There is the humour and the sheer, seething, broiling energy of the prose, which is peppered with the kind of language your mother would call unforgivable. As in Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh at their best, it doesn't feel gratuitous. It just feels true (Sunday Times)

A rambunctious portrayal of a swaggering off-kilter underclasss (Patricia Nicol Sunday Times)

This year's Baileys prize winner, the interlinked stories of chancers, gangsters and no-hopers in Cork city, is crime caper, teen romance and blisteringly dark social satire all rolled into one. Angry, funny and full of heart (Guardian summer reads)

From the Back Cover:

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016

'He was definitely dead, whoever he was. He wore a once-black jumper and a pair of shiny tracksuit bottoms. The back of his head was cracked and his hair matted, but it had been foxy before that. A tall man, a skinny rake, another string of piss, now departed. She hadn't gotten a look at his face before she flaked him with the Holy Stone and she couldn't bring herself to turn him over.'

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight . . .

Biting, moving and darkly funny, The Glorious Heresies explores salvation, shame and the legacy of Ireland's twentieth-century attitudes to sex and family.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 144479888X
• ISBN 13: 9781444798883
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384