Pub date: 14 Feb 2025, €15.00

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Valentine’s Day 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Irish writer Val Mulkerns. To celebrate, 451 Editions brings out a special edition of her widely-acclaimed first novel,  A Time Outworn.  Originally published by Chatto and Windus in 1951, it’s a coming of age story set in Ireland just after the Second World War.

When Maeve Cusack falls short of the marks required for a university scholarship, her immediate prospects are unclear, complicated by her relationship with the bookish young Diarmuid. An intelligent and fiercely independent soul, Maeve’s decisions are life-changing and highly untypical for the times.  As much a portrait of post-war Irish society as of its distinctive heroine, it’s a compelling fiction debut. 

The New York Times praised it as “written in a cool and lovely prose”. The Irish Times called it “a sensitive, intelligent first novel”. 

Frank O’Connor, in a piece commissioned by Harpers Bazaar, wrote: “the prose is the sort that only a woman of genius can write, with every word like a dart at a target.”  In his foreword to the new edition, Carlo Gébler notes: “There are few if any Irish novels written and published in the period with the breadth of interests in all senses that are on display in A Time Outworn.”

The official publication date will be February 14 2025, to celebrate the centenary of Val Mulkerns’s birth on February 14 1925.  For more about the author, click here. 

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