John Broderick

'Fearless and frank and sometimes comic' Colm Tóibín'I absolutely loved The Pilgrimage... Brilliant... A book about what it feels like to live with doubt and still keep going' Orla Mackey 'A brooding and beautifully observed short novel' Jan CarsonSomeone knows about Julia Glynn's affair. She and husband Michael are the envy of their neighbours: prosperous, devout, the model couple. Then one day, an anonymous letter arrives with the morning papers, describing Julia's trysts with Michael's nephew in obscene detail.Frantic with suspicion and frustrated desire, Julia imagines catastrophe in their small, curtain-twitching town. As the letters keep arriving, she struggles to retain composure and proceed with plans for a family pilgrimage to Lourdes - only for other buried scandals to come knocking at the door of their pristine home.Frank in its depiction of sexuality and queerness in 1950s Ireland, The Pilgrimage was immediately banned on original publication. Outrageous and bleakly funny, it is a powerful evocation of the corrosive effects of repression.

Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid-century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him.  Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s.  A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.

First published in 1973 and swiftly banned, John Broderick’s An Apology for Roses returns as one of the most audacious portraits of provincial Ireland ever written. Set in a midlands town where respectability masks obsession, corruption and thwarted desire, the novel follows the intersecting lives of Marie Fogarty – clever, restless, dangerously sure of her own charm – and Father Tom Moran, the charismatic curate drawn into her orbit. Around them spin the claustrophobic rituals of family, gossip, religion and commerce: suffocating drawing-rooms heated to excess, whispered devotions, clandestine meetings in lakeside chalets, nights of hunger, fear, exhilaration and betrayal. Broderick exposes the hypocrisies of Irish Catholic life with wit, psychological acuity and a fearless eye for the erotic and the grotesque. A novel banned in its own time for its frankness, An Apology for Roses stands now as a darkly glittering masterpiece, bold, unsettling, and unforgettably alive.