by Emer Martin (Author)
Abandoned by her parents when they resettle in Meath, Mary O Conaill faces the task of raising her younger siblings alone. Padraig is disappeared, Se n joins the Christian Brothers, Bridget escapes and her brother Seamus inherits the farm. Maeve is sent to serve a family of shopkeepers in the local town. Later, pregnant and unwed, she is placed in a Magdalene Laundry where her twins are forcibly removed. Spanning the 1930s to the 70s, this sweeping multi-generational family saga follows the psychic and physical displacement of a society in freefall after independence. Wit, poetic nuance, vitality and authenticity inhabit this remarkable novel. The Cruelty Men tells an unsentimental tale of survival in a country proclaimed as independent but subjugated by silence
Author Biography
Emer Martin is a Dubliner who has lived in Paris, London, the Middle East and the USA. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won Listowel Book of the Year in 1996. More Bread or I'll Appear, her second, was published internationally in 1999. Her third novel, Baby Zero, was published in the UK and Ireland in 2007, and in the USA in 2014. She has worked as a theatre producer and publisher, founding the publishing cooperative Rawmeash in 2014. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She now lives between California and Co. Meath in Ireland.