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One Irish family's fight for survival makes for an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, hunger, and redemption.
At just sixteen, Nancy Martin leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair and a devastating chain of events that continues to unfold over three generations.
Spanning more than a century, Billy O'Callaghan's weaves together the journey of an Irish family determined against all odds to be free. In 1920, Nancy's son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be. And in the early 1980s, Jer's youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house just steps away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies ahead for those who will survive her.
This moving portrait of life in Ireland is set in the village where O'Callaghan's family has lived for generations, and is partly based on stories told by his parents and grandparents. His writing is imbued with lived experience and hard-earned truths, creating a novel so rich in life and empathy it is impossible to let go of his characters. An ambitious and lyrical family saga, this novel confirms Billy O'Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers.
"O'Callaghan's tender latest explores three generations of an Irish family forced to deal with hardship and loss...Inspired by stories from his own family history, O'Callaghan delivers a slim novel that is thick with memory and regret. The hard lives of the Martins leave readers with an indelible impression of Irish history." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[O'Callaghan] writes with a bright, enlivening emotional palette and a penetrating eye for the details of family history—not least because he is tapping his own past, as the acknowledgements note. A deeply felt and distinctive work by a real craftsman." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"O'Callaghan has done a brilliant job of capturing the ethos of the Irish setting as we see it through the beautifully created lives of his characters, who are extraordinary, as is this timeless book about them." - Booklist (starred review)
"Life Sentences tightens Billy O'Callaghan's claim to a permanent place in Irish fiction. The humanity and authentic grace of his characters are upheld by a keen ear for the Munster lexicons of grievous love. There are paragraphs of surpassing power, able to break and bind the heart at once." - Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking
"Billy O'Callaghan has long been one of my favorite writers; his way with a short story being no less than masterful. Also a splendid novelist, he now has returned to the novel and brought his remarkable narrative skills to a work of downright epic scope, making that special form utterly his own. Life Sentences is an enthralling book by a world treasure of a writer." - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
This information about Life Sentences was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Billy O'Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of four short story collections: In Exile (2008, Mercier Press), In Too Deep (2009, Mercier Press), The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013, New Island Books, winner of a 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award and selected as Cork's One City, One Book for 2017), and The Boatman (2020, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.)), as well as the novels The Dead House (2017, Brandon/O'Brien Press and 2018, Arcade/Skyhorse (USA)) and My Coney Island Baby, (2019, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.)).
His latest novel, Life Sentences, was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2021 to much acclaim.
Billy is the winner of a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for the short story, and twice a recipient of the Arts ...
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