A Second Life
A Second Life
by Dermot Bolger
The groundbreaking first modern novel to address the scandal of Irish Magdalene laundries when it was first published.
9781848408524 | May 27th 2022 | €13.95 | Paperback | 302pp
Following a car crash, for several seconds Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead but finds his progress towards the afterworld blocked by a haunting face he only partially recognises. Restored to a miraculous second chance at life – he feels profoundly changed. He is haunted by not knowing who he truly is because this is not the first time he has been given a second life. At six weeks old he was taken from his birth mother, a young girl forced to give him up for adoption. Now he knows that until he unlocks the truth about his origins, he will be a stranger to his wife, to his children and to himself.
Struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his birth mother, embarking on an absorbing journey into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions.
The first modern novel to address the scandal of Irish Magdalene laundries when it was published in 1994, A Second Life continued to haunt Bolger’s imagination. He has never allowed its republication until he felt ready to retell the story in a new and even more compelling way. This reimagined text is therefore neither an old novel nor a new one, but a completely ‘renewed’ novel, that grows towards a spelling-binding, profoundly moving conclusion.
“This beautiful novel shows Bolger at his best. The twisty, often surprising plot is driven by the characters, and as they are all empathic, and ring true, the reader is constantly rooting for them. There is a mysterious element to the novel too, which adds drama and colour. In all, this is a great achievement and a valuable addition to the canon.”
“For me it is Bolger’s finest work ... remarkable in its sensitivity and tragic in its accuracy.”
“A marvellous, multi-faceted, fascinating read…Ireland itself (its landscape, its tensions and generational conflicts) is brilliantly realized.”
“Audacious and moving. Bolger’s brilliant conflation of detective story, ghost hunt and history lesson is compulsive.”
“A devastating, brilliantly wrought novel from one of our finest.”
