Foggage
Foggage
by Patrick McGinley
This revised edition of Foggage explores the tension, humour and dark aspects of Irish rural life with renewed vigour.
B-format, paperback | 264pp | ISBN 9781848404366 | Release Date August 2015
‘I'll bet the neighbours see me as an old maid and you as a sapless bachelor. Little do they know that there's more heat in this house than in all the other houses of the townland put together.’
Foggage tells the story of Kevin Hurley and his twin sister Maureen, living in rural Ireland with their ailing, bed-ridden father. What makes this story unique, however, is that Kevin and Maureen have been conducting an incestuous relationship for the past three years. With as much twists and turns as a remote Irish boreen, McGinley’s novel explores the tragic consequences of a relationship like no other. New Island is delighted to publish Foggage as part of its Modern Irish Classics series, which aims to give a new lease of life to some of the best of Irish writing of the last fifty years.
Praise for Patrick McGinley
“Patrick McGinley’s gifts for resonant dialogue, sexual frictions, graphic violence, and peripeteia have been well noted for over three decades by readers and critics who relish the extravagances of getting lost beyond the Pale.”
“If ever proof was needed that art is not a meritocracy, and success relies more on luck than talent, you’ll find it in Patrick McGinley’s Bogmail. First published in 1978, reissued by New Island, this is not just a great crime novel but a great work of literature.”
“Mr McGinley is inventive and eloquent, his humour puckish and Paddy-wry; he has a fine command of comic irony … and his evocations of landscape and seascape are successful, not simply as description, but as definitions of a mythic environment.”
“An imaginative, expertly turned dark comedy, informed by some splendid dialogue and a sensual feel for the claims of the soil ... Patrick McGinley is a very gifted man. He knows his Irish bog as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer does the shtetl, and he can sing about it with something like the same magic.”
