In the Season of the Daisies — Tom Phelan

The story of Seanie Doolin, surviving twin of a brutal civil-war murder in the Irish midlands, forms the core of this extraordinary debut novel. In 1948 the Town, shadowed by its buried past, prepares for a visit from de Valera and President O’Kelly. Over twenty-four hours events and individuals converge as, one by one, the men who were there that dreadful night in 1921 speak out – schoolteacher, doctor, butcher, priest, victim – each with his own involuntary vision of hell. Seanie Doolin, a man-child tortured by poetry and grief, roams the hills repeating one talismanic word, Camarawn. His pain and loss, the presence and purging of evil, love’s redemption, and the pathology of ancient animosities within ordinary lives, is conveyed in language that is simple, direct and emotionally devastating. In the Season of the Daisies is a powerful work of literature which introduces a voice new to Irish fiction.