Boulevard Wren and Other Stories

Book excerpt: Boulevard Wren and Other Stories is the stunning follow-up to the bestselling Gospel According to Blindboy, and a warped mirror held up to the Irish psyche. Provocative and unsettling, the stories rove through the centuries, from the barren fields of Famine-struck Meath to the chaotic landscape of the near future, where social media has colonised the deepest recesses of the human subconscious. This is a world populated by characters lost and at odds with the demands of contemporary life, for whom the line separating redemption and madness has grown impossibly fine. Razor-sharp social satire, it is an era-defining work from one of Ireland's most anarchic satirists and a quietly devastating portrait of a society in disarray.