Overview

The sweeping story of 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 Life Sentences 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 these characters. This ambitious and lyrical family saga confirms Billy O'Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers.

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9798200895922

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Reviews

A superb and moving novel. O'Callaghan is one of our finest writers...and this is his best work yet. -- John Banville, New York Times bestselling author A thoughtful, slow-motion novel, an antidote to the tics and quips of some millennial fiction. -- The Spectator (London) 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 O'Callaghan dissects the trials and survival of a Cork family across several generations...He writes with a bright, enlivening emotional palette and a penetrating eye for the details of family history...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) The reader is invested from the start...So poetically elegant as to be breathtaking...writing at its finest. -- New York Journal of Books

Author Information

"Billy O'Callaghan won the Irish Book Award for the title story of his collection The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind and is the author of two other short story collections, In Exile and In Too Deep. His debut novel, The Dead House, was an Irish Times bestseller. He was a finalist for the 2016 COSTA Short Story Award, the Glimmer Train Prize, the Faulkner Wisdom Prize, and the Seán Ó Faoláin Award and has published his stories widely on both sides of the Atlantic. He resides in County Cork, Ireland. Gerard Doyle, a seasoned audio narrator, he has been awarded dozens of AudioFile Earphones Awards, was named a Best Voice in Young Adult Fiction in 2008, and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. He was born of Irish parents and raised and educated in England. In Great Britain he has enjoyed an extensive career in both television and repertory theater and toured nationally and internationally with the English Shakespeare Company. He has appeared in London's West End in the gritty musical The Hired Man. In America he has appeared on Broadway in The Weir and on television in New York Undercover and Law & Order. He has taught drama at Ross School for the several years. Helen Lloyd is a British actor and voice artist who recorded her first voice-over at the age of fourteen. Since then, she has spent much of her life interpreting other people's words and bringing characters to life. A classically trained actor, she has performed with many of Britain's leading repertory theaters, as well as at the Edinburgh Festival, the Roundhouse, and on the West End. Anne Flosnik, a seasoned audiobook narrator, has over four hundred titles to her credit and several awards and distinctions, including AudioFile Earphones Awards, a USA Today Recommended Listening selection, an AudioFile ""Best Narration of the Year"" selection in 2009, and the American Library Association's Special Services to Children Award. She has also been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She is an award-winning British actress with lead credits on stage, on television, and in commercials and voice-overs."

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