Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library

Life sentences, Billy O'Callaghan

eng

technical information on music

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fiction

Life sentences

Billy O'Callaghan

The sweeping story of one Irish family's fight for survival makes for an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, hunger, and redemption. At just sixteen, Nancy Martin leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair and a devastating chain of events that continues to unfold over three generations. Spanning more than a century, Billy O'Callaghan's Life Sentences weaves together the journey of an Irish family determined against all odds to be free. 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 just steps away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies ahead for those who will survive her. This moving portrait of life in Ireland is set in the village where O'Callaghan's family has lived for generations, and is partly based on stories told by his parents and grandparents. His writing is imbued with lived experience and hard-earned truths, creating a novel so rich in life and empathy it is impossible to let go of these characters. This ambitious and lyrical family saga confirms Billy O'Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers. "The reader is invested from the start...So poetically elegant as to be breathtaking...writing at its finest." "O'Callaghan has done a brilliant job of capturing the ethos of the Irish setting as we see it through the beautifully created lives of his characters, who are extraordinary, as is this timeless book about them." "O'Callaghan dissects the trials and survival of a Cork family across several generations...He writes with a bright, enlivening emotional palette and a penetrating eye for the details of family history...A deeply felt and distinctive work by a real craftsman." "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." "A superb and moving novel. O'Callaghan is one of our finest writers...and this is his best work yet." "A thoughtful, slow-motion novel, an antidote to the tics and quips of some millennial fiction."

adult

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