Life Sentences
The unforgettable Irish bestseller
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
*THE #3 IRISH BESTSELLER*
'Momentous and epic' BERNARD MACLAVERTY
'Superb and moving' JOHN BANVILLE
'A lovely, piercing book' SEBASTIAN BARRY
Three generations. More than a century of famine, war, violence and love.
At sixteen Nancy, the only member of her family to survive the Great Famine, leaves her small island for the mainland. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she feels irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair that soon throws her into a fight for her life.
In 1920, Nancy's son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be.
And in the early 1980s, Jer's youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house, moments away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies in store for those who will survive her.
'Brilliantly immerses us in its respective time periods' SUNDAY TIMES
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Callaghan's tender latest (after the collection The Boat Man) explores three generations of an Irish family forced to deal with hardship and loss. In 1920, Jer Martin, a WWI veteran, still suffers the trauma of trench warfare. After the death of his sister, Mamie, Jer goes on a bender and ends up sleeping it off in jail, where he nurses a grudge against Mamie's worthless husband, Ned Spillane. A section set in 1911 has Jer's mother, Nancy, who was born at the end of the potato famine, remembering an episode when she found work at age 19 in one of the big houses of Cork City. There, she was seduced by the estate's handsome married gardener, Michael Egan, and went on to have two children by him. And in 1982, Jer's dying, 64-year-old daughter, Nellie, living in a council house with her daughter and son-in-law, recalls the time Jer was forced to illegally bury her dead infant son in a cemetery, only to be caught in the act by the local priest. Inspired by stories from his own family history, O'Callaghan delivers a slim novel that is thick with memory and regret. The hard lives of the Martins leave readers with an indelible impression of Irish history.
