Oct 11

Oct 11 The Glorious Heresies

Author: Lisa McInerney
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books (original US edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbor threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight . . .

Biting, moving and darkly funny, The Glorious Heresies explores salvation, shame and the legacy of Ireland's twentieth-century attitudes to sex and family.

TL;DR Review

Brutal, raw, and incredibly told, The Glorious Heresies will grab your heart when you’re not looking and then crack it wide open. I can see why it won so many prizes.

For you if: You read literary fiction that examines what it means to be human in a way that’s hard to look away from.

Full Review

“He left the boy outside its own front door. Farewell to it, and good luck to it. From here on in it would be squared shoulders and jaws, and strong arms and best feet forward. He left the boy a pile of mangled, skinny limbs and stepped through the door a newborn man, stinging a little in the sights of the sprite guiding his metamorphosis. Karine D’Arcy was her name.”

^^ So begins The Glorious Heresies, which I read as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge; it won the Women’s Prize in 2016. And with opening lines like that, it’s easy to see why.

The book introduces us to several characters who become randomly interconnected when an older woman hits an intruder in the head, killing him, and her mobster son makes it disappear for her. Our characters are the woman, her son, the dead man’s girlfriend (who is a prostitute), and her teenage her drug dealer, and his father, who is also the man whom the mobster hired to help dispose of the body. Keeping up? lol.

Anyway, what Lisa McInerney has done in this novel is extraordinary in that I didn’t realize how attached I was to the characters until my heart was breaking wide open for them. And once the gutting started, it didn’t stop. These characters are imperfect and struggling and they have a lot of trauma. They’re not particularly good people, but she shows the nuggets of good in their hearts that make you want them to all just live happily ever after, for goodness sake. Ryan — the son/drug dealer — got me the hardest. Literally my heart hurts just thinking about him.

This is very, very much a character-driven plot. It doesn’t race ahead, and yet it’s propulsive nonetheless. Expertly crafted and beautifully rendered, as they say. As one who wins the Women’s Prize does.