Headwreck

Emer Martin is an original, radical and vital voice in Irish writing.Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon (1996), won Book of theYear 1996 at the Listowel Writers' Week. Martin was awarded theGuggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1999. Her most recent,critically acclaimed, novel, The Cruelty Men (Lilliput 2017), wasshortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award 2019 andchallenges a history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and themistreatment of women in mid twentieth-century Ireland. Headwreckby Emer Martinis both a stand-alone workand continuation of the fictionalized epic intergenerational familysaga, from 1970 to the present day. It follows the story of theO'Conaills, an Irish-speaking family who had moved from Kerry tothe Meath Gaeltacht, and the disasters that ensue for their childrenin Irish institutions. Told from Mary O'Conaill's perspective, thevoice in the novel is that of a natural storyteller with a finely tunedear for language and symbolism, lending shape to the historicaltraumas endured by its characters.