By Billy O'CallaghanNarrated by Gerard Doyle, Anne Flosnik, Helen Lloyd
Length6h 33m
About this audiobook
The sweeping story of one Irish family’s fight for survival makes for an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, hunger, and redemption.
At just sixteen, Nancy Martin leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair and a devastating chain of events that continues to unfold over three generations.
Spanning more than a century, Billy O’Callaghan’s Life Sentences weaves together the journey of an Irish family determined against all odds to be free. In 1920, Nancy’s son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be. And in the early 1980s, Jer’s youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house just steps away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies ahead for those who will survive her.
This moving portrait of life in Ireland is set in the village where O’Callaghan’s family has lived for generations, and is partly based on stories told by his parents and grandparents. His writing is imbued with lived experience and hard-earned truths, creating a novel so rich in life and empathy it is impossible to let go of these characters. This ambitious and lyrical family saga confirms Billy O’Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers.
Narrated byGerard Doyle, Anne Flosnik, Helen Lloyd
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateApr 5, 2022
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1#1
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3#3
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About the author
Billy O'Callaghan
Billy O’Callaghan won the Irish Book Award for the title story of his collection The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind and is the author of two other short story collections, In Exile and In Too Deep. His debut novel, The Dead House, was an Irish Times bestseller. He was a finalist for the 2016 COSTA Short Story Award, the Glimmer Train Prize, the Faulkner Wisdom Prize, and the Seán Ó Faoláin Award and has published his stories widely on both sides of the Atlantic. He resides in County Cork, Ireland.View all by Billy O'Callaghan
