Headwreck - Emer Martin

Emer Martin is an original, radical and vital voice in Irish writing.�Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon (1996), won Book of the�Year 1996 at the Listowel Writers' Week. Martin was awarded the�Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1999. Her most recent,�critically acclaimed, novel, The Cruelty Men (Lilliput 2017), was�shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award 2019 and�challenges a history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the�mistreatment of women in mid twentieth-century Ireland. Headwreck�by Emer Martin�is both a stand-alone work�and continuation of the fictionalized epic intergenerational family�saga, from 1970 to the present day. It follows the story of the�O'Conaills, an Irish-speaking family who had moved from Kerry to�the Meath Gaeltacht, and the disasters that ensue for their children�in Irish institutions. Told from Mary O'Conaill's perspective, the�voice in the novel is that of a natural storyteller with a finely tuned�ear for language and symbolism, lending shape to the historical�traumas endured by its characters.