Book description
"Electric, real, utterly modern: this is a voice to welcome
and to watch" - Anne Enright. Set on Ireland's Atlantic coast,
Before the House Burns is a tender, implosive first novel by an
award-winning short story writer and poet. It concerns the lives of
its three young narrators, children of a bereaved father and witnesses
to a shared grief. This nuanced and heart-breaking account of one
family's struggle - for work, shelter and happiness - enters the
imagination through this braided, pitch-perfect tale of a family whose
lives fracture around two tragic events. It is a story of what happens
when self-sustenance turns to isolation, a story about the hard
scrabble to find a home. Despite their sufferings, this is not yet
another tale of an unhappy Irish childhood. What makes this novel
unique is not only the calibre of the writing, but also its depiction
of the love that binds the family together as they suffer blow after
blow to their lives.
Mary O'Donoghue was born in 1975 and grew up in Co. Clare. Her short
stories have been published in Agni, Salamander, The Dublin Review,
Literary Imagination and elsewhere. Her awards for fiction include
Hennessy/Sunday Tribune, New Irish Writer and a writer's bursary from
Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is the author of poetry collections
Tulle (Salmon Poetry, 2001) and Among These Winters (Dedalus Press,
2007). She teaches in the Arts and Humanities division at Babson
College, Massachusetts, and lives in Boston.
