John Broderick – författare

Banned on its 1961 release and long overlooked, The Pilgrimage returns as a startlingly modern portrait of desire, secrecy and small‑town conformity. John Broderick’s fearless debut follows Julia Glynn, a respectable wife in an Irish midlands town whose carefully arranged life begins to fracture after a series of anonymous letters expose the frailty of the world she inhabits.As Julia, her ailing husband, their watchful manservant and an ambitious young doctor prepare for a pilgrimage to Lourdes, the novel plunges into the hypocrisies, longings and unspoken tensions that shape a society crackling with self-awareness and concealed passions. Darkly comic, unsettling and steeped in the atmosphere of 1950s Ireland, The Pilgrimage offers a daring exploration of sexuality, power and self‑deception. Tt stands as a vivid, transgressive classic that feels as provocative, and as essential, as ever.

First published in 1973 and swiftly banned, John Broderick’s An Apology for Roses returns as one of the most audacious portraits of provincial Ireland ever written. Set in a midlands town where respectability masks obsession, corruption and thwarted desire, the novel follows the intersecting lives of Marie Fogarty – clever, restless, dangerously sure of her own charm – and Father Tom Moran, the charismatic curate drawn into her orbit. Around them spin the claustrophobic rituals of family, gossip, religion and commerce: suffocating drawing‑rooms heated to excess, whispered devotions, clandestine meetings in lakeside chalets, nights of hunger, fear, exhilaration and betrayal.Broderick exposes the hypocrisies of Irish Catholic life with wit, psychological acuity and a fearless eye for the erotic and the grotesque. A novel banned in its own time for its frankness, An Apology for Roses stands now as a darkly glittering masterpiece, bold, unsettling, and unforgettably alive.

Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid‑century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him. Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s. A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.

“Pulsating with passion, parochialism, guilt and greed, this exposé of scandal and secrets is shocking and witty.” —Sally Morris, The Daily MailAn erotic nightmare of Catholic longing, guilt, and desire and a banned classic of modern Irish literature.Wealthy and devout, Michael and Julia Glynn are the envy of their neighbors and the model Irish Catholic couple, bearing Michael’s increasingly painful and crippling arthritis with stoicism. In hope of a miracle, their priest suggests a family pilgrimage to Lourdes. Yet these pious holiday plans are thrown into disarray when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.Banned in Ireland on its first publication in 1961, Broderick’s debut arrived “like an incendiary device” (Sunday Independent). The Pilgrimage anticipated the deep shifts that would soon turn the country’s theocratic society upside down. It is a darkly comic, blasphemous, and sexually charged chamber drama laying bare the hypocrisies of a small Irish town “as watchful as the jungle,” and teetering on the brink of catastrophe. In the words of Colm Tóibín, in his foreword to this edition, The Pilgrimage “cleared a space in the jungle so that its wildness could be more easily seen.”