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The Cruelty Men

The Cruelty Men

Edited by

Author: Emer Martin
€18,00 EUR
€18,00 EUR
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This novel is a new work from the prize-winning author Emer Martin. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won Book of the Year 1996 at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week.

Abandoned by her parents when they resettle in Meath, Mary O Conaill faces the task of raising her younger siblings alone. Padraig is disappeared, Seán joins the Christian Brothers, Bridget escapes and her brother Seamus inherits the farm. Maeve is sent to serve a family of shopkeepers in the local town. Later, pregnant and unwed, she is placed in a Magdalene Laundry where her twins are forcibly removed.

Spanning the 1930s to the 70s, this sweeping multi-generational family saga follows the psychic and physical displacement of a society in freefall after independence.

Emer Martin’s mother-and-baby homes and Magdalene Laundries are the Irish cousins of Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulags; her dispassionate depiction of the ordinary psychotic violence at the heart of families and society in rural Ireland is akin to that of Ferrante’s Naples.

In The Cruelty Men, two Irelands run in stark parallel: a gentle land of fairy rings, blackberry picking, and poker evenings with the local priest, and a system in which the Church and State incarcerate the vulnerable for profit. The intimacy of the first person accounts draws the reader into the world of each character. Their stoicism makes their suffering all the more moving and dignified.

A delightful abundance of poetic and surreal phrases, quips and curses in this book give it a vitality and authenticity. Poignant and swift, The Cruelty Men tells an unsentimental yet emotional tale of survival in a country proclaimed as independent but subjugated by silence.

Details

ISBN: 9781843517399

Extent: 488

Published:

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Praise and Reviews

  • ‘The dark multi-generational chronicle highlights the importance of storytelling and the innate desire for belonging. Martin, herself a wonderful storyteller, has an acute appreciation of language, symbolism and lost folklore.’ THE SUNDAY TIMES

  • There’s an incandescent rage at the heart of The Cruelty Men that burns so brightly, it will sear itself onto the consciousness of all who read this powerful and moving novel.’ SUNDAY BUSINESS POST

  • ‘A dark and fascinating read [on] the nature of family, Irishness, and identity.’ THE JOURNAL

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About the Author

Emer Martin is a Dubliner who spent formative years in Paris, London, the Middle East and New York. She now lives with her family in southern California where she teaches writing, painting and resisting. Her garlanded debut novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won Book of the Year 1996 at Listowel Writers’ Week. Her second, More Bread or I’ll Appear, was published in 1999. Baby Zero, her third novel, came out in 2007. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and founded the publishing cooperative Rawmeash in 2014. The Cruelty Men was published by the Lilliput Press in 2018 and shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2019.Emer Martin is a Dubliner who has lived in Paris, London, the Middle East, and various parts of the USA. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won Book of the Year 1996 at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel, was published internationally in 1999. Her third novel, Baby Zero, was published in the UK and Ireland March 2007, and released in the USA in 2014. She has worked as a theatrical producer and publisher, founding publishing cooperative Rawmeash in 2014. Emer was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She now lives between California and Co. Meath in Ireland.

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