John Broderick

Someone 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.

Willie Ryan returns to his home town in ‘the great central plain of Ireland’, having escaped from the insane asylum where he was committed, and unvisited, by his devout Catholic family for twenty-five years. The given pretext for his commitment was an attack on his sister-in-law, Mary Ryan, wife of his brother Michael. The true reason: an affair with a hedonistic young man who introduced him to art, literature and music. In this exposee; of the ‘petty bourgeois snobbishness, hypocrisies and pretensions of the ‘little grocer’s republic’ of 1950s Ireland, nothing evil happens as long as it is not seen. Through Willie’s piercing vision, we see the truth of his brother Michael’s grief and remorse, his nephew Chris’s fear of freedom, and the perceptiveness of asylum nurse Halloran. As Willie prepares for death, he agrees to a private family mass, setting the stage for a confrontation with father Mannix, one of those complicit in putting him away.

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.

An erotic nightmare of Catholic longing, guilt, and desire and a banned classic of modern Irish literature. Wealthy and devout, Michael and Julia Glynn are the envy of their neighbors and the model Irish Catholic couple, bearing Michael’s increasingly painful and crippling arthritis with stoicism. In hope of a miracle, their priest suggests a family pilgrimage to Lourdes. Yet these pious holiday plans are thrown into disarray when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations. Banned in Ireland on its first publication in 1961, Broderick’s debut arrived “like an incendiary device” (Sunday Independent). The Pilgrimage anticipated the deep shifts that would soon turn the country’s theocratic society upside down. It is a darkly comic, blasphemous, and sexually charged chamber drama laying bare the hypocrisies of a small Irish town “as watchful as the jungle,” and teetering on the brink of catastrophe. In the words of Colm Tóibín, in his foreword to this edition, The Pilgrimage “cleared a space in the jungle so that its wildness could be more easily seen.”

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.