Life Sentences

by Billy O'Callaghan

Overview

“Poignant....powerful.”—New York Times

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567927320
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	1,066,919
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Billy O’Callaghan is the author of four short story collections (In Exile, In Too Deep, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind, and The Boatman) and the novels The Dead House and My Coney Island Baby. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and earned him numerous honors, including three Bursary Awards for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and, in 2013, a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award for the Short Story of the Year. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals and magazines around the world, including: Absinthe: New European Writing, Agni, Bellevue Literary Review, Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review, Kyoto Journal, London Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander, and Saturday Evening Post. Mr. O’Callaghan lives in Cork, Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

01/24/2022

O’Callaghan’s tender latest (after the collection The Boat Man) explores three generations of an Irish family forced to deal with hardship and loss. In 1920, Jer Martin, a WWI veteran, still suffers the trauma of trench warfare. After the death of his sister, Mamie, Jer goes on a bender and ends up sleeping it off in jail, where he nurses a grudge against Mamie’s worthless husband, Ned Spillane. A section set in 1911 has Jer’s mother, Nancy, who was born at the end of the potato famine, remembering an episode when she found work at age 19 in one of the big houses of Cork City. There, she was seduced by the estate’s handsome married gardener, Michael Egan, and went on to have two children by him. And in 1982, Jer’s dying, 64-year-old daughter, Nellie, living in a council house with her daughter and son-in-law, recalls the time Jer was forced to illegally bury her dead infant son in a cemetery, only to be caught in the act by the local priest. 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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Billy O’Callaghan uses a trio of voices in his poignant novel Life Sentences as three generations of an Irish family probe a legacy of poverty and war. ....powerful.”
—New York Times

“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)

“O’Callaghan 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 (starred review)

“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

“Life Sentences is aptly named, because the novel is as involved with the rhetoric of people’s personal stories as it is with the Hand of Fate’s pointed finger—whether that comes in the form of Mother Church, or war, or by what still remains, sadly, the ongoing war over women’s rights, and their bodies. Billy O’Callaghan is a new writer to me, and I’m happy to have made the discovery.”
—Ann Beattie

“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

“O’Callaghan is one of our finest writers and this is his best work yet.”
—John Banville

“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

“His prose is a feast after a famine... Invariably delightful.”
—Irish Times

“The reader is invested from the start . . . So poetically elegant as to be breathtaking . . . writing at its finest.”
—New York Journal of Books

“His prose is a feast after a famine... Invariably delightful.”
—Irish Times

Praise for Billy O’Callaghan

“A welcome voice to the pantheon of new Irish writing.”
—Edna O'Brien

“Billy O’Callaghan’s work is at once subtle and direct, warm and clear-eyed, and never less than beautifully written. He has a moving ability to express the hopes and fears of ‘ordinary’ people, and he knows intimately the ways of the world. This writer is the real thing.”
—John Banville

“I know of no writer on either side of the Atlantic who is better at exploring the human spirit under assault than Billy O’Callaghan.”
—Robert Olen Butler

“Billy O’Callaghan’s writing is a profound, uncommon blend of grit and beauty, with sentences that, like his characters, are simultaneously sparse and infinitely rich.”
—Simon Van Booy

From the Publisher

★ 2021-12-24
Irish writer O'Callaghan dissects the trials and survival of a Cork family across several generations.

O’Callaghan’s previous novel, My Coney Island Baby (2019), looked at two married lovers facing a painful shift in their years of monthly trysts. Here his sharp pen digs through about 100 years of an Irish family’s life, using the voices of three members in as many major sections. In 1920, Jer is drinking heavily to feed the darkness brewing from his sister’s death and the blame he heaps on her husband. The police, fearing violence, keep him away from the funeral by putting him in jail. There, his thoughts turn to the Great War, the father he knew only in scattered visits, the destitution of his early life with his sister and mother. The Nancy section, from 1911, renders those early years from his mother’s point of view, centering on her affair as a young housemaid with a gardener and their two children, whom the father largely abandoned, condemning her to a grim term in the workhouse and prostitution. Last comes Jer’s daughter Nellie, whose life is winding down in 1982 and who recalls the death of her firstborn after just a few hours. In a memorable scene, she and her husband and father embark on a midnight prowl to the Catholic cemetery to bury the unbaptized infant against church rules. There, they meet and defy a priest in a concrete rejection of the church that echoes instances of shaky or absent faith elsewhere in the book. There’s much darkness in O’Callaghan’s "sentences." Even the title’s pun carries a shadow. Yet he 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