LAUNCH: Thirsty Ghosts
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Join Lilliput Press at Books Upstairs to launch Thirsty Ghosts by Emer Martin with guest speaker Theo Dorgan and singer Caitríona O’Leary performing on the night.
All are welcome!
‘An untamed dreamtime held together by stories, this is a wild river-run of a novel about Ireland’s dark histories, narrated in the merry voice we associate with Emer Martin, one of our truly original writers. Her wry humour gives the grimmest stories an exuberant buoyancy. And seldom has English as spoken in Ireland – from rural Tyrone to south Dublin suburbia – been so perfectly conveyed on the page.’ ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNE
‘Emer Martin casts a cold eye on Ireland and the Irish in this layered narrative which ranges from myths to myth-busting over the comforting fictions we tell ourselves.’ MARTINA DEVLIN
‘Inventive, freewheeling and utterly fearless, Thirsty Ghosts delves into the Irish psyche with no holds barred. An incisive and intriguing novel.’ CHRISTINE DWYER HICKEY
Emer Martin’s is a radical, vital voice in Irish writing, as she challenges the history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the mistreatment of women across mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland.
Two families inhabit this immersive polyvocal work, an intergenerational saga announced with The Cruelty Men (2018) and continued here as punk rockers and Magdalene laundries spiral into a postcolonial Ireland still haunted by its tribal undertow. Scenes surface from Ireland’s mythological past, Tudor plantations, workhouses and industrial schools, the Troubles laid bare, the transformative pre-digital decades playing out in this propulsive narrative. Thirsty Ghosts is epic in scope while intimate in focus.
The Lyons, professionals in a newly independent state, are attacked by paramilitaries in their family home in Tyrone. The eccentric O Conaills of Kerry, traumatized by displacement, find themselves in leafy Dublin 4. We encounter a servant who meets Henry VIII, a Lithuanian Jewish family who become part of the fabric of Dublin, and a wild young girl who escapes the laundry only to stumble into a psycho pimp.
Related with dark humour, verve and high literary style, Thirsty Ghosts is a revelatory exploration of Ireland combining themes of power, class, fertility, violence and deep love, forces as universal as the old stories that permeate and illuminate each character’s life.
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 (1995), 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.
ABOUT THE GUEST SPEAKER
Theo Dorgan is a poet, and also a non-fiction prose writer, novelist, editor, documentary screenwriter, essayist, librettist and translator. His published work includes Making Way (New Island 2013), Sailing for Home (Penguin 2004; Dedalus Press 2010) and Time on the Ocean (New Island 2010) as well as eight collections of poetry, six translated works, and more.
ABOUT THE PERFORMER
Caitríona O’Leary is known internationally for her intense and passionate performances of Early Music and Traditional Irish song and as a composer. Her recording, The Wexford Carols, featuring guest artists Tom Jones, Rosanne Cash, and Rhiannon Giddens, reached #1 on the Billboard and Amazon charts. She has recorded over twenty critically acclaimed albums with her Trad band Dúlra, her Early Music performance ensemble eX & the ensembles Sequentia, The Harp Consort and Joglaresa amongst others.
