Emer Martin and Irvine Welsh

Time and date

Sunday 14 July 2024

6:30 pm

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In this event we bring you two very different books by two authors, Emer Martin and Irvine Welsh, who have been friends for many years. Emer is an Irish author and Irvine is a Scottish author, and whilst they both spend much of their lives abroad their work is very influenced by the countries they grew up.

Emer Martin is an original, radical and vital voice in Irish writing who challenges the history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the mistreatment of women across mid twentieth-century Ireland.

Irvine Welsh is known to many as the author of Trainspotting and he’ll join us with Resolution, this brand new novel in the CRIME series featuring former detective Ray Lennox, which will be published in July.

Emer and Irvine will be in conversation with Eoghan O'Sullivan

Admission: €16

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In Emer Martin’s Thirsty Ghosts, two families intertwine in this energetic new work, an epic intergenerational saga that began with The Cruelty Men (2018) and continues here as punk rockers and Catholic laundries collide and spiral forward into a post-colonial Ireland still haunted by history. Interweaving scenes from Ireland’s mythological past, the Tudor plantations, the Magdalene laundries and the 1980s, Thirsty Ghosts is epic in scope but intimate in focus. The Lyons, professionals in a newly independent state, are attacked by paramilitaries in their family home in Tyrone. The displaced eccentric O’Conaills, traumatized by industrial schools and laundries, find themselves in leafy Dublin 4. There’s a servant girl who meets Henry VIII, a Lithuanian Jewish family who become part of the fabric of Dublin, and a wild young girl who escapes the laundry only to stumble into a psycho pimp. Related with dark humour and high literary style, Thirsty Ghosts is a revelatory exploration of Ireland; its themes of power, class, fertility, violence and deep love are as universal as the old stories that illuminate the characters’ lives.

 

The truth is what we say the truth is… In Irvine Welsh’s Resolution, former detective Ray Lennox is determined to start a new life. He has left Edinburgh Police behind for a fresh career and a fresh relationship in Brighton. Then he meets Mathew Cardingworth. Rich, smooth-talking and immaculately dressed, he is seemingly a pillar of the local community – yet he soon draws Lennox back to a past that he’s desperate to forget. As Lennox identifies the links between Cardingworth, a series of violent attacks and the disappearances of a group of foster care boys, he is forced to ask himself: what must he sacrifice to expose the truth?

 

Writers

Emer Martin

Emer Martin is a Dubliner who has lived in Paris, London, the Middle East and New York, and is now living in California where she teaches writing, painting and resisting....

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Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh was born and raised in Edinburgh. His first novel, Trainspotting, has sold over one million copies in the UK and was adapted into an era-defining film. He has written...

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Eoghan O'Sullivan

Eoghan O’Sullivan is an arts journalist with the Irish Examiner, covering music, books, and podcasts. He has hosted a music podcast, The Point of Everything, since 2015, producing 225-plus episodes to date,...

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