Life Sentences
BILLY O’CALLAGHAN
(JONATHAN CAPE, 240 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

During the twentieth century, Ireland seemingly leapt in one bound into the realm of high-tech modernity, and away from the world of home-made clothes, stone cottages down the boreen, and the calendar of holy days and agricultural activity. As the scholar Luke Gibbons observed in 1996, “Ireland is a First World country, but with a Third World memory.” Billy O’Callaghan’s new novel, Life Sentences , is a lyrical, poignant, gripping description of one family’s ­experience of this transition.
Life Sentences tells of three generations of life in West Cork. The book begins with Jer Martin, a young soldier who has survived the horrors of the First World War, and who has returned home to face a series of personal battles, including the death of his sister, his sickening wife and an alcoholic brother-in-law who is bringing the family to ruin.