Lit
The Luck Penny
Shortlisted for debut novel on Simon Mayo’s BBC Radio 5 Live.
Though predominantly a meditation on unresolved grief, the novel also explores themes of colonisation, religious prejudice and language shift through the prism of private trauma. Irish Times
It was a morning on which a war might have started. The storm the previous night had all but stripped the lime trees,
and the ground around the rectory was water-logged. There wasn’t a sound of chick or child out on Sackville Square as the Reverend John Drew dragged open the flaking wooden shutters. He suddenly found himself wishing the three women were back again: Judith lolling about on the armchair, her nose buried in a book; Theodora tricking with some embroidery she had been set in Miss Markham’s; and Eliza, in the background, calling out commands to Bridget Doheny in the scullery. But now he was alone with himself, with no warm words to soften the uneasy moments between dawn and dusk. And Westmacott’s sojourn in
Aghadoe had been deferred. His eye fell on the letter lying on the oak escritoire under the bedroom window.
Lanscombe Terrace
September 15 1849
My Dear John,
I hope this letter finds yourself, Eliza and the girls in good fettle. It is with great chagrin that I have to tell you that I will be unable now to keep
up our assignation over the next two week…
Reviews
John Maher is a complex and intriguing writer. As high-class entertainment, this is seriously comic storytelling. Irish Independent
An accomplished confection of death, trauma, psychosis, paranoia, illicit love, colonial power and native subversion. Irish Book Review
An expertly crafted, tender tale of grief, language and land… A richly rewarding read. Metro
Beautifully written… Maher writes with wonderful sympathy and insight… The Luck Penny is the work of a dedicated and gifted writer who has plenty to say. Sunday Business Post
A superbly executed story about bereavement told through characters that intrigue from the first. Sunday Tribune
The Coast of Malabar - Short Stories
Winner of the first national RTE Francis MacManus Short Story Award
‘I thought the winner had everything…almost flawless…I was very much taken by it.’ James Plunkett, author of Strumpet City
The children had been put to bed now and the evening was beginning to settle into night. The drawing room was heavy with their silence. The older woman in the easy chair eyed her daughter-in-law by the window. She remarked to herself at the way she had of digging her hands into the pockets of her angora cardigan. This signalled stubbornness to her. Neither woman spoke. Leah kept her eye on the road outside and her back towards her mother-in-law. She was not a tall woman herself, but dressed to present the illusion of height. When she stood at the top of the steps to see her son off to the local school in Ranelagh, only the hands in the pockets of her culottes concealed the tale of three children which her hips told. Her hair, drawn back from the high forehead she had inherited from her father’s family, was tied in a ponytail. When alone, she had the habit of chewing her hair before the mirror. She was a fair woman in most matters but would not tolerate cats in the house. In childhood, she had taught herself to remain silent when silent best served her purpose. She heard the other woman’s voice behind her.
‘It can’t go on like this, Leah. And Robert knows it too.’
Both women could hear the student below in the basement flat in conversation with Robert, their words dulled by the distance.
from Leah’s Tale
When the Sun Bursts
Winner of Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Work in Progress
When the Sun Bursts tells three overlapping tales: a young woman ‘kidnapping back’ her child against the backdrop of the 1916 Rising in Dublin after an impulsive mercy killing, a love affair between an Irish woman of high social standing and a German woman agent, and the tale of a Zeppelin officer on his way to bomb Dublin, haunted by his daughter’s illness in Berlin. It is a tale of public and private wars and the spaces in between.
The Westmoreland Lock Hospital.
Easter Monday, 1916, 6.00 a.m.
I didn’t come to kill the woman in the backward – of that much I am sure now, in my own mind. As sure as I am of the gutty little porter who looked down his nose at me that Easter Monday morning, long ago and the stink of stout on his breath. At me, Sadie McDonald, not the size of a God’s cow. I didn’t come to kill but to carry the secret in my scalded heart, back through the big-bellied doors of the Westmoreland Lock Hospital, onto Townsend Street and down along the quays to the South Dublin Union. So I could chew over it quietly and see what I would do next, among the piss-pots and the bed pans and the young grinding the old.
When I peeped through the gap in the great oak doors at women in the beds that morning, I remember thinking to myself: those poor girls couldn’t all be streels, could they? I straightened up the purple pork pie hat as best I could, pulled the black net veil down over my face and blessed myself three times to keep from catching what had driven them into their lonely, cold beds.
Then I stepped inside the backward silently, like a child waiting for a clip on the ear. To find the woman I had no intention of killing. Until I met her…
A Short History of Darkness
John Maher confirms himself as one of Irish writing’s brightest stars.’
Sunday Tribune
‘Maher writes with wonderful sympathy and insight…a dedicated and gifted writer who has plenty to say.’
Sunday Business Post
A Short History of Darkness is set between London, the southern Irish midlands and the Western Galilee, between the late forties and the present. It is the story of two tainted love affairs, set decades apart. At the heart of the story is an Irish academic, Jack O’Donnell, retired on ‘burn out’ from a British university, who is trying to unearth the secret behind the murder of a young Irishman – his putative father- in the British Army in British Mandate Palestine, in 1948, while balancing two love affairs, in two towns, thousands of miles apart. It is more a tale of love mislaid than lost.
Rondo: The Memoirs of Dr Josef Divonne, Late of 2me Lyons
‘It was the first night of High Thermidor and an ironic, roseate moon hung above the streets and alleyways of Rondo. Its light fell, without favour, upon the tree-lined boulevard of First Bakers, clinging to the late leaves and needles of the Obvious trees…’
Josef Divonne, late of Deuxieme Lyon, is angry with the past.
With the glorious tales of the Sudden War and The Purifications (of Africa and the Italies) doled out by veterans Foucarde and Du Bois and his father, around the chateau table, as they chomped on meats and fishes from the colonies of AngloIreland. At the start of the humid hell of High Thermidor, with a motley crew of fellow dissidents, he crosses the Caesium Ponds to Rondo. Josef Divonne feels he is home, at last, far from the vulgar life of Lower Europe with its interminable solar curfews.
He will eventually be forced to admit, however, in mumbled Lower European: ’s gibt rien aqui! ‘s gibt rien! He is in a country which does not exist. In effect, a prison colony for Lower European dissidents. Not even the coveted dragonfly in the glass cage by his bed will suffice to make him happy now. He is trapped in Rondo now – in his ‘perfect’ country. He has even begun to miss his wife and his sightless father…
‘Daringly prescient to the point of prophecy, wickedly insightful and most impressively crafted, this searing yet hugely enjoyable novel is in the grand tradition of De Quincey, Jonathan Swift and, latterly Chris Morris. In an age of worthy but predictable writing, Maher’s book is sui generis. It simply demands to be read.’
Pat McCabe, author of ‘The Butcher Boy.’