by EleanorO’Reilly (Author)
'heart-breaking, heart-warming, and hilarious . . . a glorious debut' Ruth Hogan. bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things
Meet the Augustts: a loving, Irish family who, like all families, are a bit complicated. But they are bound together by their love for each other and the way their words shape their world.
Things become even more complicated when the mother has a stroke, and the force of nature who is Granny Mae-Anne comes to try and take charge to keep the family together.
She has a job on. There's the son Jacob with all his words trapped in his head by The Autism, the father Mickey struggling to express himself at all, and Jenny, the daughter, quietly writing it all down to try and make sense of it.
M for Mammy is about language and home and the power of a family to heal itself. It is about telling stories, reading stories, and writing them down. It is a story of a young boy without words, of a mother who has lost her words and a father full of stories he has to learn to tell. And then there's the granny who hammers and shapes words on the anvil of love, and a daughter who tries to speak for them all.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 432
Publisher: Two Roads
Published: 21 Mar 2019
ISBN 10: 147367235X
ISBN 13: 9781473672352
Eleanor O'Reilly is a teacher of English and Classical Studies who has just completed an MA in Creative Writing, at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Having first started writing five years ago, she has received several literary prizes, including the 2015 RTE Francis McManus Radio Short Story Award and the 2013 William Trevor International Short Story Award, and has been shortlisted for several others, including the 2016 Colm Toibin Literary Award.
She lives in Ireland with her husband Brian Kelly, their daughter Ella Kelly, and a whole menagerie of pets. M for Mammy is her debut novel.