Val Mulkerns – författare

This is the Third Edition of Val Mulkerns' critically acclaimed novel, originally published in 1984 by the historical British publishing house, John Murray. Every summer members of the O’Donoghue family return to the Irish garrison town of Ferrycarrig to the house where they all grew up. It seems none of the family has quite escaped the meshes of their childhood. In that house academic excellence has always been taken for granted and there is no quarter for those who failed. Eleanor, the cleverest daughter, retains her status but despises her husband Con. Their daughter, Julia, retreats from parental rejection into a private world of her own. Ruth, married to Martin, a favourite grandson, wonders why family members want to spend each summer at Ferrycarrig when past summers linger around the place like ghosts. This brilliant portrait of a family is described by five of its members, each interlocked in a dependence that seems to transcend time. All those summers and four generations give a splendid evocation of family life.

This new collection brings together a selection of Val Mulkerns’ short fiction from three collections, Antiquities (André Deutsch, 1978), An Idle Woman, (Poolbeg Press, 1980) and A Friend of Don Juan (John Murray, 1988). The stories take us from the cell of a rebel prisoner in 1916 through hard times in Dublin of the 1930s, the changing world of Ireland in the 60s and 70s and finally the eponymous ‘Memory and Desire,‘ a quintessential tale of the 80s.

Irish author Colm Tóibín described the title story as “one of the finest short stories that has been published in Ireland for many years”. Sebastian Barry has described Val Mulkerns as “a masterly writer in the tradition of Seán Ó Faoláin” and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright has said about the collection:  “When writing is this accurate, this good, it does not fade.”

In her Irish Times review of the work, Enright continued:  "it is remarkable how these stories, published between 1978 and 1988, consistently point to things we pretended, in those days, not to know."  The collection, often taking in characters largely ignored by Irish fiction writers, provides a keen and compelling glimpse of Irish society with prose that Sebastian Barry also called, “beautiful stories so composed they border on a very special Mulkernsian wildness.”