ISBN 978-0-9931443-1-8
206 pages / €12.95 / Pub date: 10 Dec 2017
This brand new title from renowned Irish author Val Mulkerns is an elegant memoir now out for Spring 2018. Launched by author Ita Daly in The Gutter Bookshop, Dalkey (see photos here) the book is available in any good book store or online internationally – see links below.
A long-standing figure of Irish letters and member of Aosdána, Val Mulkerns’s writing has been described by Sebastian Barry as, “a masterly writer in the tradition of Seán Ó Faoláin” and in an Irish Times review of Memory and Desire last year, Anne Enright noted that in her work, “liberalising, Shavian voices form a neglected strand of the Irish tradition.”
It’s not surprising, then, that this new title takes the form of an elegant memoir, which begins with tales of intriguing ancestors, leads us through early days of a Bohemian Dublin childhood and then to a teaching position in Britain, and to explore the sunnier climes of post-war Europe and Italy. On her return to Dublin, she began working at the famed literary review, The Bell under editor Peadar O’Donnell.
Her first novel, A Time Outworn, was released to critical acclaim in Ireland in 1952. In 1953 she married Maurice Kennedy and they have two sons and a daughter. She subsequently published four more novels, two children’s books and many essays and critical writings. She later worked as a journalist and columnist and has been a much-loved voice on RTE’s “Sunday Miscellany” programme down the years. Last year her title Memory and Desire brought together a selection of the author’s best short stories.
Friends With the Enemy is a beautifully written tome takes in almost 70 years of life and times in literary Ireland. See more at the publisher’s website: www.451Editions.com
This title is now available in all Irish bookshops by order through Gardners, and online internationally from:
IRELAND: Dubray Books / US: Barnes and Noble, ABE Books / UK: Foyles / Waterstones
FRANCE: Amazon.fr / GERMANY: Book Depository / AUSTRALIA: Booktopia / INDIA: The India Bookstore