Join the conversation at Bantry Library to hear two wonderful debuts by Irish authors. Gavin McCrea’s Mrs Engels and Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells were both selected as Book of the Month for the Irish Times Book Club.
In Gavin McCrea's stunning debut novel, we follow Lizzie Burns, a poor worker from the Irish slums and the common law wife of Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto. As the promise of an easy existence in the capital slips from her view, she gains in its place a profound understanding of herself and of the world. While Frederick and his friend Karl Marx try to spur revolution among the working classes, Lizzie is compelled to undertake a revolution of another kind: of the heart and the soul. Haunted by her first love, a revolutionary Irishman; burdened by a sense of duty to right past mistakes; and torn between a desire for independence and the pragmatic need to be taken care of, Lizzie learns, as she says, that 'the world doesn't happen how you think it will. The secret is to soften to it, and to take its blows.'
