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 claustr...

An erotic nightmare and 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 doubt when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.Banne...

"This book is all about our lives. We're on a journey of discovering the life-changing beauty of God's grace. It's all about knowing Jesus!" Pastor Michael Fehan, Lighthouse Fellowship Church, North Quincy, MAAfter an almost-fatal fall on January 5th of 2020 in front of his seventeen-year-old son, John was unconscious for three weeks at Boston Medical Center hospital. His family was immediately confronted with the age-old question: Is there really a God?Cou...

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...

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.

Willie Ryan returns to his home town in 'the great central plain of Ireland' after escaping from the asylum where he was committed, and unvisited, by his devout Catholic family for twenty-five years. The pretext for his incarceration was an attack on his sister-in-law; the real reason, an affair with a hedonistic young man who introduced him to art, literature and music. In this exposé of the 'petty bourgeois snobbishness, hypocrisies and pretensions' of the 'little grocer's republic' of 1...

An erotic nightmare and 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 doubt when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.Banne...