Exile

Padraic O'Conaire

Exile ranks as one of the most colourful and audacious novels in the Irish language, the earliest example of modernist fiction in Gaelic. Its instantly memorable protagonist, Micil O’Maolain, is hit by a car shortly after arriving in London from Galway to look for work. Emerging from hospital, he has lost an arm and a leg, and his face is casta millte scolta: ‘twisted, warped and ruined’. He becomes a sideshow freak to support himself, travelling around England and back to Galway, but returning eventually to London, where he dies, down and out, in one of the city’s parks.

Written in 1910, this short but powerful work was to foreshadow Padraic O’Conaire’s own tragic end in a pauper’s ward in Dublin but beautifully evokes the bittersweet experience of the Irish diaspora in the early twentieth century, long before the ‘London Irish’ felt at home. Out of print for many years, this acclaimed translation of O’Conaire’s only novel allows a long-neglected classic of Irish literature to shine once more.

PADRAIC O'CONAIRE is one of Ireland's greatest Gaelic writers. Born in Galway City in 1882 he became an orphan at the age of 12, resulting in him flitting between Ireland and London. But, while his restless and imaginative spirit resulted in a considerable body of celebrated stories and verses, as well as this novel, it was to have tragic consequences. As modernism took hold in literature, his work was forgotten, and he died penniless in 1928, aged forty-six.