BY THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED PROPHET SONG.'Paul Lynch is peerless' Donal Ryan, author of Strange FlowersSpring 1832:…
Donegal, north west Ireland. Coll Coyle wakes to a blood dawn and a day he does not want to face. The young father stands to lose everything on account of the cruel intentions of his landowner's heedless son. Although reluctant, Coll sets out to confront his trouble. And so begins his fall from the rainsoaked, cloud-swirling Eden, and a pursuit across the wild bog lands of Donegal. Behind him is John Faller - a man who has vowed to hunt Coll to the ends of the earth - in a pursuit that will stretch to an epic voyage across the Atlantic, and to greater tragedy in the new American frontier. Red Sky in Morning is a dark tale of oppression bathed in sparkling, unconstrained imagery. A compassionate and sensitive exploration of the merciless side of man and the indifference of nature, it is both a mesmerizing feat of imagination and a landmark piece of fiction.
After his death, a public figure leaves behind an astonishing manuscript – an embarrassment to his godson, the executor of…
his estate. What should be done with these disconcerting essays, which touch on disparate topics, jumping from the iconoclastic to the ironic, from the moving to the provocative, from the highbrow to the eccentric, at times preposterous and ridiculous, but all fundamentally contradictory? It is a difficult question to answer, especially as none of these essays seem to match the persona he hid behind and seem to have been written against everything he stood for. Is this really a tribute to procrastination from a workaholic? Or a tribute to the tavern from someone who never frequented them? Are these truly tributes? Or are they pranks instead, farcical tricks, intended to be ironic, a full-on hoax, allowing the author to strip away all pretence in order to communicate authentically?There was only one thing left to do: publish them. Que sera sera.