Liam McIlvanney teaches at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His first novel, All the Colours of the Town, is out in August.
Eilis Lacey is a young Enniscorthy woman who has never dreamed of leaving Ireland. Friary Street and Castle Street, the square and the cathedral: the grey co-ordinates of her small County Wexford town will doubtless always be with her. But this is 1950s Ireland, in which there is ‘no work for anyone . . . no matter what their qualifications’. Eilis’s father is...
Sectarianism seldom plays any part in Scottish writing. One of the few exceptions – and the most pertinent to Liam McIlvanney’s novel – comes in Ian Rankin’s Mortal Causes...
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