The Fabulists Casey, Philip €7.50 - now €3.75 Half price save €3.75 ISBN: 1 874675 30 9 Format: Size: Publication Date: Physical Copy (supplied by Lilliput Press) Add to Basket View Shopping Basket

Rights: World (X UK rights sold to Serif)
Listowel Writers' Week Book of the Year 1995
The Fabulists is a love story set in contemporary Dublin. After a brief encounter on the Ha'penny Bridge over the Liffey, Tess and Mungo contrive to make their paths cross again. 'Two spoofers,' Tess thinks to herself. 'It might even be fun.' The relationship that develops extends the horizons of their lives on the dole, struggling with children and marriage, filled with sexual longing, and hungry for purpose.

As life and fantasy interweave between Dublin, Wexford, Berlin and Barcelona, Tess and Mungo consummate their love through tales which are erotic, exotic and often guilt-ridden, confronting truths about themselves, and restoring the fabric of a torn past.
This novel about love and parenthood, desire and frailty, describes ordinary lives and emotions in an extraordinary way.

'A deeply accomplished first novel. Casey has a penetrating eye for the stuff of everyday relationships and the compassion to turn the ordinary into compelling and vivid fiction.'
- Eoin McNamee, The Irish Times

'The emotions explored are deep and serious, the characters get all our sympathy ... a stunningly truthful and perfectly pitched novel'
- Colm TÃ3ibÃ-n

'This is a passionate, erotic mature novel that displays many of the virtues which contemporary Irish fiction so conspicuously lacks: an intelligent vision of an adult relationship coupled with an intelligent vision of contemporary Irish Society ... a supple prose style which is a constant joy to read.'
- Ronan Sheehan, Irish Press

'Casey has an uncanny ability to portray the needy fragility and boundless imaginative desire of a woman's unfolding sexuality.'
- Katie Donovan, The Big Issue

'Mortally angelic writing by a man that understands as no one else does the seam of gold and revelation in the strict greys of the mundane'
- Sebastian Barry, The Irish Times

THE AUTHOR
Philip Casey was born in London in 1950 and raised in Co. Wexford, before travelling widely in Israel and Europe. His previous works include The Year of the Knife, Poems 1980-1990 (1991), and a one-act play, Cardinal. This is his first novel. He lives in Dublin and is a member of Aosdána.