Author:
Billy O'Callaghan
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Sign up todayLife Sentences
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Learn moreThe sweeping story of 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 Life Sentences 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 these characters. This ambitious and lyrical family saga confirms Billy O’Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers.
Billy O'Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: In Exile and In Too Deep(2008 and 2009 respectively, both published by Mercier Press), and The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind'(2013, published by New Island Books), which was honoured with a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award and which has been selected as Cork's ""One City, One Book"" for 2017.
His first novel, really a ghost story entitled The Dead House, was published by a small Irish press (Brandon Books/O'Brien Press) in May 2017, and will be published in the U.S. by Arcade in May 2018.
A recipient of the 2013 Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year, and a 2010 Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award for Literature, his story, ""The Boatman"" was recently shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. He has won and been shortlisted for numerous other honours, including the George A. Birmingham Award, the Lunch Hour Stories Prize, the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, the Sean O'Faolain Award, the RTE Radio 1 Francis MacManus Award, the Faulkner/Wisdom Award, the Glimmer Train Prize and the Writing Spirit Award. He was also short-listed four times for the RTE Radio 1 P.J. O'Connor Award for Drama. He also served as the 2016 Writer-in-Residence for the Cork County Libraries.
http://billyocallaghan.ie/en/
Helen Lloyd is a British actor and voice artist who, since recording her first voiceover at the age of fourteen, has spent much of her career speaking other people’s words and bringing characters to life. A classically trained actor, she has performed in many of Britain’s leading repertory theatres and in the West End. She began narrating audiobooks in 2013.
Anne Flosnik is an accomplished British actress with stage, TV, commercial, voiceover, and audiobook experience. She has narrated over 300 audiobook titles in a wide range of genres and has received several awards and distinctions, including an American Library Association Special Services for Children Award, multiple Earphone Awards, and multiple Audie nominations.
Gerard Doyle has appeared in London's West End in The Hired Man and in Shakespeare's Coriolanus and The Winter's Tale, and has toured nationally and internationally with the English Shakespeare Company. He has appeared on Broadway in The Weir and on television in New York Undercover and Law and Order. Mr. Doyle is also an award-winning audiobook narrator.
Audiobook details
Narrators:
Helen Lloyd, Anne Flosnik & Gerard Doyle
ISBN:
9798200895984
Length:
6 hours 32 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:
April 5, 2022
Edition:
Unabridged
Reviews
“The reader is invested from the start…So poetically elegant as to be breathtaking…writing at its finest.”
“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.”
“O'Callaghan dissects the trials and survival of a Cork family across several generations…He 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.”
“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.”
“A superb and moving novel. O’Callaghan is one of our finest writers…and this is his best work yet.”
“A thoughtful, slow-motion novel, an antidote to the tics and quips of some millennial fiction.”
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